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It’s a new semester, a new staff, and a new Managing Editing team. Conveniently our initials spell “Pen,” which seems auspicious for the 50TH VOLUME OF THE INDY!!!
Here are 50 things we want this semester: divestment, a dozen eggs (?), meal swipes, clean conmag fridge, coffee, Noser stick, BAI grants, answers to our fundraising emails, pre-midnight copy, more unsecured printers, buzz cuts, lucrative post-grad employment, 1 more blizzard, new shoes, lucid dreams, UFB integrity, animal stickers, natural light, my melody, a perfectly poached egg, to want, inscrutable visions, winning lottery ticket, good academic standing, mahler success, non-neoliberal translation of Capital, metabolics submissions, Indy merch, for the week to get reviewed, love, praise, OPTs, distinction, official portrait, entanglement, Indy dinner party, ferments, hot professor ��, better haircut for 1 ME (who?), later sunsets, clean whiteboards, another couch, pad Thai, fair contracts, 12 steps, a cold one, no incompletes, crosswords, sunrise, and for our staff to know we love them.
With excitement, Paulina, Emily and Nan ��
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
c Welp! There’s an elephant in the room, and it’s got hearts for eyes! Every Valentine’s Day, which is literally today, an elephant with heart shaped eyes and a penchant for mischief is released from the Providence Zoo…like, as a sacrifice to make sure Mayor Providence gets love. And it’s right behind you! Gah! But yeah, we don’t like that. We don’t like the elephant behind you, and we certainly don’t like it anywhere near us. We think it’s too big, and it might be a bitch. Not to, like, use that word, we don’t much care for that word, or think it is good, but this elephant might be one. You don’t know. We don’t want it to step on any of our art projects. Or hurt us physically.
Instead, on the 14th, we will proudly and subversively celebrate GALENTINE’S Day with a verve and fervor that can only be described as MENSTRUAL and NO ELEPHANT! So here we are, two lowly typists (née secretaries, née-née scriveners) who are drafting the SPARKLIEST group of Gal Pals the whole world has ever seen with its BIG BRIGHT NORMALSHAPED EYES! We want these Gal Pals to share in our Love and Devotion, and also mostly to protect us with their bodies from any elephant-related incidents or disasters. We live in fear today.
But baby girl, sweetie little baby pie, teensy little sugar lamb with a face so cute, we’re not looking for just ANYONE. Our hearts can only hold so much love, and in the realm of Gal Pals, we must practice economic AUSTERITY! Love is a finite resource, like COAL ���� and it can conquer nothing! But how do we get love? How do we get the Gal Pals of our Dreams and keep them forever? How do we fend off this elephant until it goes back home to its nest later this evening? We WRITE A PERSONAL AD LOOKING FOR EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT!!!! And they will come flocking to us like lint on the yoga pants of a mom-to-be. And shield us, please. Let’s just ⌘V and: Tall, handsome, queerplatonic MF duo, both BIG deals at their respective houses of worship, seek an elite unit of Gal Pals to assemble this Feb 14 fpr GALENTINES DAY festivities (no socks allowed) and dire personal safety concerns. We both loooove Sprite and think Michael Jordan could have been taller, maybe as tall as us. Interested parties can dm us @SevenSuperGirls or locate us beneath a structure.
We only have room in our hearts for the types of people listed below, so read our list and know thyself:
♥ A hometown princess type who curls her hair with Cola cans and has a lot of respect for her Dad. Should have a jaw thicker than the Bible and a heart softer than soup!
♥ One BABY! Who is so small and little. You are so small people think you’re a peanut. Elephants, even, might think you’re a peanut. This is a requirement.
A bitter, grizzled polar bear who is super strong and knows some fight moves (kicks, punches, hurtful puns). A plus would be if they are face to face with the gaping maw of starvation
♥ The human representation of the gaping maw of starvation
♥ Metal Mario from MarioKart. He’s so dense and metal i hope hes reeallll <33333 i hope you are him
♥ Lava Girl
♥ A 20-something quilter who, sexually-frustrated, seeks connection from the members of a retired women’s art club. Weaving more than just friendships, she discovers a deep connection with the land below and the sky above. Awesome! she thinks, It feels awesome to feel connected. I feel so happy now, and not sexually frustrated anymore. I could do anything. I could protect anyone. From anything. Ayn Rand was wrong!
♥ Our (Kat and Ilan’s) (shared) Grandma Nesbit who was last seen throwing back her body. Frozen in time. We do not remember this, but Google Earth does. We’ve been looking for you for a while, Grandma. Please come home and be our Gal Pal.
♥ Oop! That was from a free associating task our therapist assigned us
♥ A Kitchen Wench with Stringy Blonde Plaits and a CRUSHHHH on the Chimney Sweep. Oy, mista! She thinks, strawlike strands of hair wagging and crunching beside her shapely, decidedly non-elephantine ears.
♥ Gay guy in a scarf. Where’d you get it, the gay store? Heh. Classic. Yeah, today’s gonna be a good day.
ILAN
♥ A wily witch of love who understands so much about human nature and has sparkly purple eyelids even when she sleeps at night. On the human nature front, she thinks it will all be fine. She is so damn wily that we almost believe her.
♥ Crapshoot Harry, that boy who puts the boy in boisterous. His teeth are brown. He is desperate for a new source of Elephant ivory. For tooth reasons.
Oh no! If you’ve gotten to this point, clearly no listicle entry gestured toward the deep diamond cavern of your soul. Clearly, then you think there’s no spot for you among our Gal Pals. This cannot be so, because inclusion is one of our core values, and Mayor Providence’s vicious ritual has no business interfering with it. Ach! We exclaim. No more austerity, the word itself says “Aster Idi,” which is Latin for gross. We opt for something better. AWES-terity. Like austerity that is awesome and has no Latin cognate.
We close our eyes and imagine Love. AND GUESS WHAT WE DON’T SEE! Division. We do not see division. Let’s do some g!RLM@tH (word obscured to bypass censors): if you graphed each of the listed potential Gal Pals as individual lines on a 2 dimensional plane, there would be at least one point where they would each overlap with one another. And maybe, in the infinity of math and Galhood, there would be a secret, impossible point where every line converges. A point so pregnant, it would have triplets twice. A point so welcoming, it can wave with no hands. A point so heavy with convergence, even an elephant with heart eyes couldn’t break it. Perhaps the Gal gang that can keep us safest from all that threatens us and our art projects is one with everyone in it.
SO, I guess what we have to ask is,
Will YOU be our galentine?
ILAN BRUSSO B’27 and KAT LOPEZ B’27 were rejected from Seven Super Girls.
c If you Google “the first latino president of the united states,” two seemingly-unrelated results appear at the top. The first is an article published in 2013 by the Richard Nixon Foundation. Titled “The First Latino President,” it begins with this line:
...[M]any might be surprised to learn that the first ‘Latino’ President was none other than Richard Nixon […] In fact, Latinos had more impact on a presidential election in 1972 than ever before, or since.
The article goes on to describe how Nixon, though not Latino himself, was “the best friend Latinos ever had in the White House,” highlighting the fact that “he appointed more Latinos than any preceding President.”
The second search result directly below the Foundation’s claims is a Wikipedia article about a man named Ben Fernandez. There are only two clips of him available online: one is a two-minute interview on YouTube with nine likes, and the other is an hour-long recording of his Senate testimony during the Watergate investigation. Unbeknownst to many, Fernandez was the first Latino to run for president and the true mastermind behind Nixon’s 1972 victory. His persistent efforts to steer Hispanic voters towards the Republican Party played a crucial role in shaping Nixon’s campaign and unknowingly set the stage for future Republican triumphs.
+++
Ben Fernandez was born in a boxcar to two undocumented Mexican immigrants in 1925, an origin story that would later earn him the nickname “Boxcar Ben.” After enduring a childhood of grueling farm labor with his six siblings, he joined the Air Force during World War II and wound up in California three years later with only $20, his G.I. benefits, and a hunger for wealth. Shortly after, he enrolled at the University of Redlands to study economics. When a classmate told him that the Republican Party was the party of the rich, Fernandez immediately replied, “Sign me up! I’ve had enough of poverty.” His frustration was shared by the other 400,000 Mexican-American soldiers that had returned home with him, whose wartime valor did little to change the racial discrimination and unemployment they faced back in the States.
This discontent mainly stemmed from the fact that the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which declared all peoples of Mexican descent in America “white by treaty,” legally protected MexicanAmericans from the segregation faced by Black Americans and other minorities. A 1909 Arizona law requiring voters to pass an English literacy test stated outright that it was intended to block the “ignorant Mexican vote.” Between 1848 and 1928, over 547 Mexicans were lynched in the United States, with 232 of these lynchings overseen by the Texas Rangers. By the 1930s, Mexican laborers in the Southwest began forming civil rights organizations to fight for their hard-earned “white privilege.” When the 1930 census included “Mexican American” as a separate race, members of the League of United Latin American
Citizens—one of the largest Mexican-American activist groups at the time—rose up in outrage, criticizing the census’ attempt to “discriminate between the Mexicans themselves and other members of the white race, when in truth and fact we are not only a part and parcel but as well the sum and substance of the white race.” They insisted that their connection to Spanish conquistadors granted them European ancestry, and they fought vehemently to be considered more than just second-class citizens.
As these sparks of resentment burned across the nation, Ben Fernandez was on the rise. After graduating from Redlands, he moved to New York and earned his PhD in three years before becoming a consulting economist back in California. As the U.S. revelled in its post-war economy and a booming housing market fueled by federal loans, Fernandez’s economic expertise became a sought-after commodity. He continued advocating for Hispanic involvement in the Republican Party, adamant that they were “natural Republicans” and a “golden opportunity for the GOP” because they had a “centuries-old suspicion of oppressive central governments.” In 1967, Fernandez co-founded the Republican National Hispanic Council, serving as its first chairman. Despite not receiving formal recognition from the Republican Party, the group managed to raise over $400,000 by the end of 1968, shocking Party officials who had doubted Fernandez’s ambitions. Ten years later, he would become one of the few self-made Hispanic millionaires in the U.S.
+++
Around the same time that a young Ben Fernandez was enlisting in the military, a little-known lawyer named Richard Nixon was struggling to salvage the ill-fated Citra-Frost Company, which attempted to sell frozen orange juice and went bankrupt after 18 months. His brief tenure as the company’s president came to a close when he stuffed a refrigerated boxcar full of juice pouches at his law firm and caused an explosion. Following this failure, Nixon joined the Navy, became an incredibly skilled poker player, and used his winnings to fund his first congressional campaign in 1946. His strong anti-Communist sentiments quickly established him as a prominent figure in Congress and a rising star in the Republican Party. After serving as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961, he won the presidency by a narrow margin in 1968, becoming the 14th Republican to settle into the White House’s ivory throne.
While Nixon and Fernandez were busy climbing the political ladder, American society underwent a number of drastic changes. Throughout the 1960s, the Mexican advocacy groups of the early ‘30s slowly evolved into the Chicano Movement, a coalition of Hispanic activists and revolutionaries that emulated the Black Panther Party. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed restrictions placed on immigration from non-European countries, and the Hispanic population exploded as migrant workers flocked to the border for job opportunities. When Nixon assumed office in 1968, the ink on the Civil
( TEXT LUCA SUAREZ
DESIGN SELIM KUTLU
ILLUSTRATION BENJAMIN NATAN )
Rights Act was in the process of drying, the Cold War was in full swing, and the first major protests against the Vietnam War had just begun. His campaign had relied on empty promises of economic opportunities and social programs to attract the growing Hispanic minority, and the time had come for him to follow through. Two weeks before being sworn in, fellow Republican Barry Goldwater cautioned him about the Hispanic voter base, warning, “These people are watching us to see if we will treat them the way the Democrats have.” At the same time, Lyndon B. Johnson’s commitment to ratifying the Civil Rights Act earned him 94 percent of the Black vote in his 1964 presidential campaign against Goldwater, and its ensuing passage allowed a quarter of a million new Black voters to register by 1965, effectively solidifying the Democrats as the party for Black Americans. Fearful that the Chicanos and Panthers would unite against him but unwilling to lose the support of white conservative voters, Nixon had to find a way to appease Hispanic constituents, divide his opposition, and maintain Southern support in one swift move. As the midterm elections loomed in the distance, he knew there was only one man who could save him.
In August of 1970, a group of four men met at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Among them was Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, the chairman of the Interagency Community for Mexican American Affairs, the chief administrator of the Small Business Administration, and a local businessman named Ben Fernandez. Having noted Fernandez’s unwavering dedication to the Republican Party and his unexpected fundraising abilities during the 1968 election, the Nixon administration offered him a position as the first president and chairman of the newlyfounded National Economic Development Agency (NEDA). The group was the first of its kind: a private nonprofit with a mission to “promote business development among the nation’s 10 million Spanish speaking citizens.” Vice President Agnew stated that NEDA’s purpose was to make sure “Americans of Hispanic descent get a fair chance at the starting line.” He emphasized that this mission was both a testament to the attainability of the American Dream and “a clear sign of President Nixon’s interest in what we call ‘the forgotten minorities.’” The program would become widely popular among the Hispanic population, providing loans, management advice, and marketing assistance to seven thousand Hispanicowned businesses in its first ten months while simultaneously uniting “leaders from Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Cuban Communities.”
The language used here is not incidental. Recognized today as the godfather of “dog whistle politics,” Nixon’s reference to “Spanish speaking citizens” deliberately avoided addressing ethnic inequality while appealing to economically-motivated Hispanics. In fact, the term “Hispanic” was not used outside of Spain prior to Nixon’s presidency; it was popularized by his administration specifically to categorize Spanish-speaking Americans as a single national minority, avoiding the messy controversies and racial implications sparked by the 1930 census. The label was also promoted in order to contrast
against Chicano identity, which ”reflected the more radical political agenda of Mexican-Americans in the 1960s and 1970s” according to a 1992 article by legal scholar Laura E. Gómez. Gómez also noted that “politicians who call themselves Hispanic today are the harbingers of a more conservative, more accommodationist politics.” NEDA was a powerful tool in subverting Chicano activism by promoting an individualistic view of ethnic empowerment, suggesting that business education and government programs could create more positive change than strikes or unions. Its brochures depicted smiling farmers partnering with NEDA employees to receive federal resources and a Puerto Rican couple opening a “Small Cafe Built on Resourcefulness and Enterprise.” These images reinforced the notion that Hispanic Americans already had access to the same opportunities as their white neighbors; they simply needed to act upon them. Even the organization’s logo subtly referenced the Spaniard ancestry of its constituents, depicting a sword and a crested helmet typically worn by conquistadores in the “New World.”
This subtle nudge away from activist efforts played a crucial role in isolating middle-class Hispanic voters from radical Black and Chicano activist groups. By playing into their latent desire to be treated and viewed as “white” Americans, Nixon consolidated the diverse array of Hispanic voters into one loyal voter base, creating a national identity that prioritized assimilation over resistance. Under Fernandez’s leadership, NEDA disproportionately funded campaigns within anti-Communist Cuban populations in Miami, Florida to garner donations and support, a political tactic which was revolutionary at the time. Years later, Fernandez would remark that consolidating “the Spanish-speaking people into a cohesive unit was the toughest thing I have ever done in my life.” He jokingly added that Hispanics “have a tradition of not working together. Indeed, among ourselves we joke that the Mexican-American does not talk to the Puerto Rican, the Puerto Rican does not talk to the Cubano, the Cubano talks to no one.” Fernandez’s Republican National Hispanic Council continued garnering support, roaming the country in what Nixon christened “amigo buses” while blasting salsa, cumbia, and mariachi through their speakers. The political machine was running at full capacity, and as Nixon’s first term came to a close, it was time to put it to the test.
Taking a glance at any map of the 1972 election will show you the results; a massive wave of red sweeping across every state, blanketing the nation from coast to coast. Nixon had won, and by a margin that only Ben Fernandez could have predicted. Receiving 60.7 percent of the popular vote, Nixon defeated
Democrat George McGovern in one of the largest landslide victories in U.S. history. The Republican National Hispanic Council was directly responsible for garnering over 40 percent of the Hispanic vote for Nixon, a statistic which had never exceeded 10 percent for any Republican candidate in American history. However, within two years, Nixon and Agnew would both resign from office after their involvement in the Watergate scandal. The money used to pay the burglars was quickly traced back to the inner circle of Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, a small cabinet of Hispanic insiders known as the “Brown Mafia” who were known for using questionable tactics to gain fundraising and support. One particular member of this group was singled out for questioning, and in 1973, Ben Fernandez would appear before the Senate Watergate Committee to prove his innocence.
In October of 1978, Ben Fernandez announced his decision to run for president under the Republican Party. It had been five years since he had narrowly avoided being indicted alongside the rest of Nixon’s aides, but the controversy had only strengthened his loyalty to the former president. During his testimony, he declared that he and the rest of Nixon’s Hispanic supporters “donated our time, our money, and our energies to return to office a president who had, by his actions, embraced us as first-class citizens.” In his campaign announcement, he reiterated his faith in the attainability of the American Dream, declaring that “persons not making enough to make ends meet should get two jobs.” In an interview entitled “Mexican Immigrants’ Son Enters G.O.P. 1980 Race,” the New York Times mentioned that Fernandez “identified…the ‘four fundamental values’ of the American system [as] work ethic, freedom of choice, opportunity and free enterprise.’ His text listed ‘equal opportunity,’ but he deleted the ‘equal’ in reading his announcement for the television cameras.”
No matter how strong the Hispanic voter base was, it was not enough for Ben Fernandez to be taken seriously. As support for his campaign waned, media outlets began to fixate on his immigrant parents and boxcar origins, belittling his presidential ambition as an amusing oddity and an object of ridicule. In March of 1980, an article published by The Ludington Daily News misspelled Fernandez’s name in its headline, hesitantly inviting readers to “Meet Ben Hernandez, The Next President?”. The Wilmington Star-News adopted a more overtly pessimistic outlook on Fernandez’s campaign in a piece titled “From boxcar to capital: A highly improbable dream.” It claimed that “even if [Fernandez] wins in Puerto Rico…his attempt…is bound to fail. The press will rightly regard it as an unrepeated ethnic episode.” The article’s final lines regarded Fernandez with a hint of pity, admitting that “it is fun to see the flexing of political muscle, the jaunty chauvinism of another ethnic group.” Despite ending his primary bid shortly thereafter, he would attempt to run two more times in 1984 and 1988, each endeavor ending with less fanfare than the last. Slowly but surely, Fernandez would sink into obscurity, continuing to quietly fundraise for the Republican Party until his death in 2000.
It is hard to say whether the story of Ben Fernandez is one of failure or success. While his dreams of becoming known as “The First Latino President” were usurped by his disgraced employer, Fernandez’s lasting impact on American politics is undeniable. His groundbreaking tactics to attract, redefine, and redirect the Hispanic population laid the foundation for the modern Republican Party’s strategies; since the 1972 election, roughly a third of all Latino voters in the U.S. have consistently cast their ballots for Republican candidates. The most obvious evidence of
this sustained support came in the most recent presidential election, when 46 percent of Latinos voted for Donald Trump. While claims from the Guardian and BBC that Latino men were “susceptible to Trump’s… misogynistic proclivities” or that his “economic messaging hit home with working-class voters” certainly ring true, this is far from the full story, nor should it be. Blaming the election’s results solely on its voters fails to acknowledge the larger forces at play and ultimately avoids confronting them head-on.
Trump’s success is rooted in a history of targeted rhetoric and performative gestures made by the Republican Party to ensnare those drawn to the American Dream, promising that he will embrace their “Spaniard heritage” and see them as more than votes to be won. Perhaps nobody embodies this paradox more than Ben Fernandez himself, a man whose patriotic ambitions became a tool to serve those in power and who received only nameless insignificance in return. When New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson declared himself to be the first Hispanic presidential candidate in 2008, his statement went largely uncorrected. Fernandez’s face only appears on Republican websites during Hispanic Heritage Month, where he is held up as “living proof that America is the greatest country in the world!” and celebrated for being “born in a railroad boxcar, yet, in one generation, [became] a self-made millionaire…It could only happen in America!” It is the haunting visage of a man whose image has been reduced to a token, a pawn in the game he helped create. It is in the shadow of his legacy that we find ourselves today.
SUAREZ B’26 is still waiting to be seen.
( TEXT ANGELA LIAN
DESIGN JO LEE
ILLUSTRATION ZOE RUDOLPH-LARREA )
c Last fall, I made Pad Thai in the communal dorm kitchen. Except I used leftover cauliflower instead of bean sprouts, and I didn’t add hoisin sauce (because I didn’t have any), and my singular pot was far too small for the sheer volume of noodles, and I also probably wasn’t careful enough about poultry contamination. It turned out just kind of fine, though my friend repeatedly insisted that it was “the best.” In the future, I think I’ll stick to ordering from Heng Thai, or Champa Thai, or Bee’s Thai, or Lim’s Fine Thai, or any of the other ~10,000 Thai restaurants in the United States.
The ubiquity of Thai restaurants doesn’t seem immediately surprising— after all, there are also tens of thousands of, for instance, Mexican or Chinese restaurants. However, Mexican Americans make up over 10% of the US population, while Thai Americans only about 0.1%. Maybe the food is just that good, or maybe the popularity of Thai food is the result of a decades-long campaign by the Thai government.
+++
In 2002, the Thai government launched the Global Thai Program, which aimed to open at least 3,000 Thai restaurants
worldwide. The state invested 500 million baht (nearly $15 million) to train chefs and provide investors with grants. The program quickly surpassed its goal, causing tourism in Thailand to skyrocket by over 200%. It is the most prominent and successful example of using food toward diplomatic ends. In the following years, countries such as Cambodia, Peru, Switzerland, and Vietnam have followed suit with similar institutionalized culinary campaigns, seeking the same success.
Gastrodiplomacy is a form of cultural diplomacy involving a state-led effort to promote national cuisines or food practices abroad. The goal is to create or strengthen a national culture or brand, forge diplomatic relationships, boost tourism and exports, and influence foreign public opinion. Unlike other exertions of soft power, gastrodiplomacy is often framed as a benign tool that enhances cultural connections and expands palates.
Under a Reddit r/todayilearned post about Thai gastrodiplomacy, commenters are largely grateful for the project. Top comments include “and God saw that it was good,” “If I may be so bold as to speak for the rest of the world, thank you Thailand for your gastrodiplomacy. Its [sic] delicious,” and “Best government program ever. Fucking love Thai food.” On the surface, the popularity of Thai food seems to suggest that the campaign is a win-win situation: a nation benefits politically and economically while receiving attention on the global stage, and consumers get to enjoy
delicious, previously unfamiliar foods. But it’s not that simple—gastrodiplomacy reinforces cultural imperialism, nationalism, and neocolonial power structures. +++
To be successful, gastrodiplomacy requires the consolidation and commodification of a nation’s culinary culture. The Thai government intentionally standardized the country’s cuisine and encouraged alterations that would appeal to Western palates. Pad Thai was highlighted in part because it wasn’t spicy, and some chefs alter it further by omitting fish sauce, the smell of which unaccustomed consumers may dislike. In doing so, Thai culture is flattened to meet the demands of the Western consumer at the expense of the local population.
Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which critiques the dominant Western perception of the East, demonstrates how these dynamics of representing and consuming “exotic” foods reflect broader patterns of cultural imperialism and the power relations between dominant and subaltern cultures. On an individual level, Southeast Asian restaurant owners in Western countries must consider the consumer. Often, this can look like an appeal to the Western idea of ‘authenticity,’ resulting in a self-orientalization through tokenizing abstractions of their own culture: Buddha statues, wooden bowls, vaguely Eastern-looking art, and even—in the case of a hot pot restaurant
in my hometown—a koi fish pond. This alters and further orientalizes Western perceptions of non-Western cultures—to no fault of the restaurant owners and workers who depend on these perceptions to survive financially. As a result, however, Western consumers’ misinformed views lead to the harmful dilution and erosion of culture. When tourists go abroad, they’re met with the same contrived stereotypes. As a desired outcome of gastrodiplomacy, tourism also requires cultural oversimplification and misrepresentation to cater to existing foreign perceptions. In both food and tourism, cultural practices and traditions are reduced to commodities.
When a country’s cuisine gains global recognition, it can become a source of national pride, fostering unity or a sense of superiority. Individuals may see themselves as a part of a shared national culture or an imagined community. By promoting a carefully curated version of their cuisine through gastrodiplomacy, countries emphasize their perceived cultures and create spaces for themselves within global cultural markets. This reinforces a singular sense of national identity—whether authentic or artificial—at home and abroad, creating shared spaces, discourses, and visibility that could particularly benefit diaspora while simultaneously obscuring cultural differences within the nation. By elevating certain dishes (such as Pad Thai, jamón, or kimchi) as ‘national’ foods, gastrodiplomacy creates exclusionary narratives about who exactly belongs to a nation and who can represent it. In the U.S., the singular popular image of Thai food based on a select few dishes erases the differences between regions and minority cultures. Some individual restaurants have attempted to break this mold by serving, for example, Northern Thai cuisine—but they are few and far between. The selective promotion of certain foods or culinary practices over others builds a unified national identity that obscures internal cultural diversity and contributes to monolithic outside perceptions of countries or regions.
Gastrodiplomatic programs do not consider these dangers; in fact, they encourage the marketing of culture because it allows for easier nation-branding. To the state, a ‘positive’ perception of the nation is beneficial no matter the consequences.
of Thailand in alignment with his cultural goals, while implementing other food-related practices, such as eating with a fork and knife rather than hands. Others maintain that his promotion of noodle dishes only set the stage for what eventually became Pad Thai. According to historian Chatichai Muksong, the first Pad Thai recipe appeared in the 1960s, as Thailand began developing closer diplomatic relations with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Decades later, the dish is now the face of a largely Western-focused gastrodip lomatic campaign.
If Pad Thai was developed with the West in mind, whether for cultural goals, political alignment, or economic benefit, if it has a surprisingly short history and significant Chinese influences, and if it was essen tially fabricated and propagandized into existence—can it be considered tic? It is widely sold and eaten in Thailand, though perhaps not as popular amongst Thai people as it is in the U.S.. Then again—does local acceptance determine authenticity? Does the state? Does tradition, originality, or indigeneity of ingredients?
Authenticity is always being negotiated. Most, if not all cultural foods and food practices have a long history of influence from other cultures, including Thai cuisine. Taking a closer look at ingredients, this becomes even clearer: Pad Thai’s rice noodles come from China, and tamarind, which one recipe calls the “heart and soul of Pad Thai sauce,” is native to Africa. The citrus needed to make ceviche (Peru’s national dish) was brought to Peru from Europe, and tomatoes were brought to Italy from Peru. Culture exists in a constant process of making and remaking itself. This means that the (self-)orientalization and inaccurate cultural perceptions that are constructed and reinforced through gastrodiplomacy have the ability to shape the original culture itself, such that what was once artificial becomes authentic.
The racially charged idea that food must be polished or refined in some way implies that traditional foods are unsophisticated and unsuited for the Western palate. Marketing to a wider, often wealthier Western audience leads to the dilution and distortion of food’s original significance, revealing underlying neocolonial dynamics in which dominant countries exert control over representations of other countries. Cultural assets
Pad Thai is Thailand’s national dish and a staple at Thai restaurants worldwide despite its recent invention. Following the 1942 floods that damaged rice paddies in and around Bangkok, noodles were heavily promoted across the country to protect rice resources. This included a Chinese-inspired stir-fried noodle dish that resembles what we now know as Pad Thai. Around this time, the Thai government under Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram implemented ultranationalist Thai cultural mandates amidst French and British colonialism in Southeast Asia. Phibunsongkhram sought to cement his own power, stave off foreign (Western) influences, and forge a modernized national identity that was, ironically, Westernized. This involved renaming Thailand (formerly Siam) and developing a unified Thai identity, complete with the standardization of the Thai language. According to some accounts, Phibunsongkhram positioned Pad Thai as the national dish
Food also becomes a tool to impose or reinforce cultural hegemony, as associations, representations, and meanings of foods are determined by those in power. Through gastrodiplomacy, hegemonic nations hold the power to shape the tastes and norms of other nations. The U.S., for instance, has influenced global narratives about which cuisines and food practices are valued, accepted, and desirable (whether for ‘sophistication’ or exoticism) and which are not. Think of how chopsticks are viewed as compared to eating with one’s hands. Both practices align with existing perceptions of foreign cultures and reinforce their respective narratives of the exotic and the uncivilized, allowing consumers to ‘comprehend’ the Other.
Additionally, nations with the resources to promote their food globally can shape international tastes and norms. As such, their cuisine becomes part of the dominant global culture, further reinforcing the hegemony of powerful nations while sidelining or marginalizing cuisines from less powerful countries or regions.
Another byproduct of gastrodiplomacy is the commercialization of traditional cuisines through fusion or other attempts to ‘elevate’ ethnic cuisines with Western techniques like French cooking methods.
It hardly needs to be said that we engage with food far beyond the act of eating. What we eat is much more than fuel for the body: as a marker of social capital, a form of communication, and a part of cultural histories, food carries meaning and inherent power. For me, it’s a way to express and receive love; it is also an exciting way to explore other cultures. There is inherent value to forming connections, cooperation, and cross-cultural exposure between disparate groups, which is, in a way, part of what gastrodiplo-
Ultimately, however, gastrodiplomatic campaigns exist for sociopolitical and economic gain; they’re meant to benefit states. Gastrodiplomacy is not an effective way to participate in cross-cultural engagement because it does not attempt to present the full picture of a culture. Instead, it seeks to market a country to the rest of the world with no stake or interest in encouraging a deeper, nuanced understanding of the advertised culture. It may serve as an introduction, but even then, a weak and contrived one.
Whatever potential gastrodiplomacy might have requires that campaigns respect and preserve—rather than appropriate—origin cultures and practices. This is a lofty goal: for consumers to maintain an open mind would require the undoing of centuries-old, popularly-held beliefs about food and other cultures. Appropriation is inherent to gastrodiplomacy. It necessitates the flattening of culture to succeed: bringing all of a culture’s nuances around the world together in a uniform, consumable, marketable way is paradoxical. Perhaps, so long as gastrodiplomacy is desired and employed, it’s not possible to launch such a campaign in a way that isn’t artificial or orientalized.
If the goal is to engage with other cultures through food, consumers must recognize and interrogate essentialized representations of said cultures rather than accepting them at face value. This requires a self-aware approach to food: an active curiosity towards the histories and lived experiences of the communities involved. As states leverage food as a tool for soft power, the struggle to subvert broader neocolonial power persists. The stakes are high, but the path forward is unclear. At the very least, every bite is an opportunity to shift from passive consumption to active dialogue.
ANGELA LIAN B’26 prefers pad kee mow.
For so long it seems forever ago, the sky droops with ten ripe suns until it almost falls. Each sun hangs like a blood orange in a grocery bag, touching and tumbling. How often he wonders what they might taste like. If they will slip down as red yolks, if he can reach out and pluck and pocket one.
Outside, heat swells into a weight. He walks barefoot and elliptical, callouses all rasped flat. The bow heavy in his hands like desire. Staggering. Around, and round, and round the suns, which spill over ground and into potholes and between barbs of electric arrows. The taste in his blue mouth: sharper than he thought.
The sky flutters in the wind unfettered. His wife sits by the open window of their nine-story penthouse. Hair pinned up to let the neck negotiate. In a small black bowl she grinds together jade and egg whites and lighter fluid for a salve. Cool before applying. Now salvaging is the night’s job. She wants him to climb back up before the sun does. In the gloaming he acts strange. Is it the strong draft or how their body heat insists notice, even through the linen and distance and dark alarm. Or is it the vial he slipped under his pillow. It can’t be comfortable to sleep on, she thinks, but doesn’t ask. The sky looks barren in a known way.
They learn to tell time by how light carves the cheek. How morning begs for company. How mist caves to the demands of daybreak. For breakfast they imagine a new world and wash it down with hawthorn juice. When she’s drunk, she dares to close her eyes. Conceive of new life. Hug the sticky land under her eyelids and squeeze, for oasis. Chew slowly.
( TEXT EMILIE GUAN
DESIGN LIZ SEPULVEDA ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN )
Under the sheets, she holds his hand in her mouth. Like libations spilled then lapped up. Gestures smudged. Through the cat door, an army of vials at attention, waiting for the egret. Before he falls asleep, he asks if she wants to be immortal. She unbraids her hair. She wants the door fixed. She wants honeydew to mail back home. She wants a plot of unlit loamy soil, something that gets stuck under her fingernails.
The gods take their first son. The archer breaks the TV, shatters the lights, arrows through the tungsten clouds of heaven. She’s gaping and needy and he’s drugged to the nines to say You fucking lost it all. But doesn’t he care that she misses every one? Like night does the suns.
She digs on her knees. Dark plums blooming against earth. Joints leaking. A constellation deposits its body in the lake, and she scoops out each eye with cupped palms. He never asks her what she does out there. Instead of sleeping he debones chickens in the kitchen. Pinches their loose necks, stares into their sockets to see what the end will feel like.
After nine years she gives him a son. Her stomach floats up to the night sky, a pale flower tending the grave. Rows and rows of burning fruit fill the crater wounds. The archer shields his eyes. What cold light watching, and waiting, and whittling away. The new moon hangs swollen.
“Superior Pattern Processing is the essence of the evolved human brain,” writes professor of neuroscience Mark Mattson. Our minds’ ability to recognize patterns instinctively, often without any conscious effort, can give the illusion of prescience: in a famous “near miss” during the Cold War, Soviet Air Defense soldier Stanislav Petrov went with his intuition (and against orders), refusing to start nuclear war after receiving a (false) warning that the United States had launched an attack. His brain’s pattern processing told him there were inconsistencies: the alert cleared verification much more quickly than usual, and the number of missiles was out of the ordinary. In the end, he said, the
world had avoided complete destruction because of “a funny feeling in my gut.”
We at Schema HQ hoped to activate this subconscious, almost supernatural ability of the human mind by mining the intuitions of a room of 80 people. We showed them three random shapes 1 and asked them to complete the sequence by submitting a figure of their own. The final result was a kind of heatmap 2, the 80 responses layered on top of each other to reveal where selections overlapped. This aggregate shape 3, the product of an 80-person consensus, is an attempt to capture the definitive answer to an unsolvable problem.
We harmonized the granular data collected from individual responses, creating increasingly confident estimates of the final figure. With utmost statistical
rigor, we systematically dropped outliers from the dataset to get the most accurate result.
This method harnesses the instinctual pattern processing power of a whole room of human brains — the so-called wisdom of the crowd — using it to find a solution unknown even to the puzzle’s creators.
So what can be gleaned from the “funny feeling” in our shared stomachs? Or rather — what does the human mind produce when asked an impossible question? Perhaps the true answer lies not in our sanitized, standardized data set, but somewhere in the three blocky penises, nine pixelated smiley faces, and one desperately scribbled “I AM DUMB.”
as opposed to a CIA one. With his visions broaching the boundary into the public, tackling everything from politics to the future of K-Pop, Gregor positions himself as something of a cultural prophet.
“My neighbor got a new dog and It sounds like Sam Eliot I’d take a video but think that’s maybe illegal” (October 23, 2024)
Like most Instagram users, Gregor enjoys posting the occasional life update. With his aim of providing guidance for the non-psychic, maybe we’re supposed to take these as omens. What does it mean when our oracle enjoys Call Me By Your Name or sometimes eats too much sourdough?
“One of our favorite apps is Instagram. We look at it more
than anything else, really. All those images and words. All that performance! Sounds like art to us.”
@je_reve_de_timmy
c As per usual, Timothée Chalamet slouches French-ly in the corner of my Explore Page. The photo is of a young Timothée acting in what seems to be an early self-tape. He is in the midst of speaking, eyes on the camera, hunched in a green sweater, back against a white brick wall, flanked on the left by three lines of superimposed typewriter text (“TIMOTHEE CHALAMET / ACTOR / HELL’S KITCHEN”), everything awash in sepia. He looks really hot and almost, sort of twee.
The account is called @je_reve_de_timmy. I would never call him “timmy,” mais je rêve toujours de lui. Sometimes when I talk about Timothée, I’m suddenly speaking in French. To me, he is Timothée, not ‘Tim-oh-tay’ or “timmy.” Not too French and not too American. Like apples, pencils, and leather jackets.
Timothée is not too French and not too American when he wears a red and white striped shirt to fill his car with gas. He slants coolly, leaning on his new BMW hybrid like the chillest guy ever. In the last photo of the set, his back is turned to the camera as he steps over the tube that carries gas from the pump into his car. It’s the kind of maneuver a young driver might make when he finds himself on the wrong side of the pump, not yet familiar with the awkward mechanics of ‘getting gas.’ Shiva, the owner of the account, waxes sentimental in the caption: “Deep down, he’s just a theater kid who happens to be famous. So down to earth…it’s part of his charm.”
I agree: part of Timothée’s charm is his seeming “down to earth.” He’s just a boy from New York who wears Uggs and an Arc’teryx beanie. Shiva imagines that Timothée “has so much fun going to games, whether it’s basketball, soccer, or American football.”
Timothée is also, however, precocious and pretentious and a whole lot smarter than you would ever even expect. Sometimes he wears a “malachite green” scarf and a messenger bag with pins. If you ever in your wildest dreams got to have a conversation with him, you could talk “about anything and it would go on for hours, but feel like 3 seconds because of how interesting he is.”
Shiva places a photo of Timothée as Bob Dylan with big hair and black lenses side-by-side with a photo of big-haired, black-lensed Bob Dylan himself. Bob’s got a finger pressed to his temple: stressed, unhappy. Timothée’s hand lays upon his chin: curious, a thinker. Thanks to Shiva’s vast and contradictory assemblage of words and images, I also all at once see the Timothée that is hot, twee, French, American, chill, down to earth, precocious, pretentious, and smart. The worst thing about Bob Dylan is that he isn’t Timothée Chalamet. The best thing about Timothée Chalamet is that they gave him a fan account, instead of a quaint and easy biopic.
@gregorfancypsychic
In these times, it’s advisable to maintain a healthy degree of superstition. “I am Gregor Fancy a psychic,” bluntly states the bio line of the account @gregorfancypsychic. On a daily basis, Gregor offers short-form, digestible prophecies to his several thousand followers alongside musings, vaguely interpretable life updates, and a hazy atmosphere of mystery. His posts are defined by a minimalist simplicity that makes them instantly recognizable: purple/pink gradient background; white, hastily-typed, grammar-and-spelling-convention-defying text. Occasionally, he adds a background song on loop.
“I have considered that the black anomaly in my teeth xray is the source of my powers Are there any scitists here that can run test on me for this” (January 25, 2025)
Almost all details about Gregor Fancy are unknown, obscured behind the poorly cropped, never explained image of the Georgian flag set as his profile picture. Beyond Gregor’s one-off hypothesis questioning a dental abnormality, the causation behind his psychic abilities has never been elucidated on. Does he have visions throughout the day? Sometimes, he posts his dreams. Is he aided by any prophetic instruments––tea leaves, psychoactive substances, or a crystal ball? Perhaps. Has he always been blessed and burdened by this ability? We simply do not know. Integral to the @ gregorfancypsychic experience is the notion of sheer unknowability woven throughout his account, one that perhaps grants legitimacy to his clairvoyant workings: Gregor seems far too occupied with his psychic activities to put thought into sharing the nature of his gifts. His posts, with their typos and simplistic formatting, are drenched in urgency.
“I see you all tangled up in a metal folding chair parts of you in places they shouldn’t be twisting in ways they havnt before” (January 23, 2025)
Gregor’s response to a commenter asking for a reading about their future semester at college contains a threatening aura central to his digital profile. Like any reputable oracle, Gregor’s predictions often warn his Instagram clients of imminent, poetic tragedy, anything from razor blades in candy to the oddly-threatening “Big yuck.” Following in the literary tradition of tortured clairvoyants––think Dune or The Lifted Veil––our online oracle’s visions are plagued by the macabre.
But unlike the oracles of classical narratives, Gregor is driven by an urge to protect his followers. He’ll warn Instagram users to avoid train tracks, panini presses, elevators, the cryptid Mothman, or the town of Grimsby, England. He seems to imagine himself as a communal protector, keeping his followers wary of the dangers circulating throughout the unruly, morbid world he perceives.
“This iguanaration is boring” (January 20, 2025)
The public sphere spills over into Gregor’s online footprint; he’s ready to give social commentary on current affairs. They too are, of course, subject to his foresight. He has gloomily predicted the fall of our nation sometime in our lifetime, (“lol,” he writes) while making sure to note that, when Mel Gibson has a heart attack in the near future, it will be a real one,
Gregor, whether he’s a real mystic or a long running, ever-consistent joke, reminds us of the mysterious in life, of the incomprehensible residing in the peripheries of our experience. It’s only right to share, interpret, and, mostly, to cherish the daily remarks from Gregor’s bizarre talents.
“Purple underwear surprise” (November 14, 2024) Sometimes, he’s just inexplicable.
Two girls sit in a chicken shop, wearing matching Juicy Couture tracksuits and bedazzled denim hats. A distant phone rings while they eat. One girl fills a drink shaker with edible glitter and squints black, pupil-less eyes. The girls—Mixie and Munchie—don’t say anything.
Every video in the account follows this formula. The girls sit, wigged and heavily made-up, in an incongruous location (spaceship, beach, Buckingham Palace, etc). They squint at the camera in a weird way. Mixie makes an elaborate beverage, brightly colored and highly alcoholic. Munchie wanders the background, eating a snack. Mixie finishes the drink, and Munchie joins her for a sip. 2 girls, 1 beverage.
They are somewhere between knowing nothing and knowing everything. There is a sense that this is the first time Mixie and Munchie have ever been on Earth. They glance at passersby, alternating between fear and squinty disdain. They bumble and drop things. At the same time, their costumes reference layers of internet and pop culture. In one video, Mixie makes a meth-blue cocktail in a Breaking Bad outfit. In another, the girls read Julia Fox’s memoir, dressed in garbage bags and repurposed jeans. If they are unfamiliar with the physical workings of the world, then at the very least they are familiar with popular media.
In her essay “Notes On Camp,” Susan Sontag suggests that Camp is a “vision of the world in terms of style”—“the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” Mixie and Munchie, voiceless, are all style—exaggerated to the extreme, sexy, maybe even slightly off-putting. They embrace artifice, play into it; realism does not figure into their performance. In one video, they pretend to be Subway workers in a Domino’s.
Sontag writes that the Camp aesthetic prizes “unity, the force of the person:” the actor should always be visible in the character of the role. Camp need not be convincing in its performance. In 2girls1bottl3, theatricality replaces reality. The viewer knows that everything is a costume; the only consistency is performance. The girls may appear as bodega workers or McDonald’s employees but you never really believe that’s what they are. Their character refuses to be compromised by costume: even dressed as queens of England, they are Mixie and Munchie.
In a video tagged #versailles, Mixie and Munchie sit in a lush garden, dressed in fairy-like gowns. The post follows the usual formula—Mixie assembles rosé and pink Monster on a My Melody table mat. Then, the illusion begins to fall short: in the back of the shot, a gardener appears, picking weeds in a plastic bucket. No Versailles, then; a community garden. Munchie breaks a glass. They both break character and laugh in surprise—artifice becomes evident. In Sontag’s understanding, failure is key to the Camp sensibility. Something must always fall short of being entirely convincing. In 2girls1bottl3’s constructed world, reality always peeks through the bedazzled veneer.
( TEXT HISHAM AWARTANI
DESIGN ANAÏS REISS
ILLUSTRATION ROSIE BRANTLEY )
c In the early hours of May 13, 1990, the screeching of a train to a grinding stop heralded one of the most contentious chapters in the run-up to the dissolution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbian fans of Red Star Belgrade had pulled the emergency brakes of a night train heading to Zagreb, departing the train before it arrived at the station, where a contingent of police awaited. Throngs of football fans clad in red and white wreaked havoc in the streets of Zagreb, smashing the glass store fronts of Croat-owned businesses. By 7:30 AM, they arrived at Republic Square, clashing with Dinamo Zagreb fans and stabbing two of them with a screwdriver.
At Dinamo Zagreb’s Maksimir Stadium, the Red Star supporters were ushered to their assigned seating, hours before the gates opened to the public at 4 PM. Dinamo’s most fanatic supporters were joined by supporters of compatriot club and historical rivals Hajduk Split, and together they surrounded fans of the Belgrade team. Chants from Red Star supporters of “We will kill Tuđman [a Croatian politician]” and “Zagreb is Serbia” were met by Croat chants of “When you are happy, thrash a Serb against the floor, when you are happy, kill him with a knife, when you are happy, loudly shout Croatia, an independent state.”
At 5:39 PM, Croat supporters started pelting the Red Star fans with rocks they had stockpiled in advance. In response, the Serbian fans tore up the plastic seats to use as projectiles and climbed the wall separating the two sets of supporters, where physical altercations broke out immediately. By 6:20 PM, enraged by the lack of police intervention, Dinamo fans breached the security fence, rushing the field, and charged towards the Serbs, carrying an assortment of Croatian flags and Yugoslav tricolors with the red star (symbolizing the Yugoslav socialism which the republic was founded on) cut out. The police forces moved quickly, violently subduing the pitch invaders. The symbolic culmination of this confrontation occurred when Dinamo captain Zvonimir Boban intervened to help a Croat fan from being beaten. The police officer turned his baton on Boban, who responded with a flying drop kick.
This kick came to dominate the national Yugoslav discourse, its interpretation varying depending on political persuasion. Boban was either a Croatian national icon defending the downtrodden from the Serb-dominated state institutions, or a nationalist brute shamelessly attacking keepers of the peace. The common narratives formed around this event were complicated by the fact that the police officer on the receiving end of the infamous drop kick was not a
Serb but a Muslim Bosniak, a minority ethnic group in Serbia and target of Serbian nationalist politics. War would not break out for another year.
The clash at Maksimir highlights the importance of football in the Yugoslav political landscape. Football contributes to the construction (and dissolution) of national identity, reflects wider political currents, and provides an arena for the expression of simmering rage. The tension between a unitary government in Belgrade and calls for decentralization from Zagreb played out in the realm of football throughout the history of Yugoslavia. Running parallel to this, football played an important role in acting variously as a glue to unify the various peoples of the state together, and as a driver of wedges between them.
Before delving into the meat of this football-centric exploration, I fear there is some bookkeeping to do. The most detailed Yugoslav census occurred in 1971, with 25 listed ethnicities, and yet depending on one’s definition of ethnicity, even this behemoth list is not exhaustive of all the peoples living in the area. Each of these ethnicities has a long and complex history, deeply intertwined with various of the most important moments of Eurasian history. It would thus be a practical impossibility to formulate a discussion inclusive of all these parties, and for this reason I will limit myself to the three largest: Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks.
Yugoslavia was founded in the aftermath of WWI as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. It was composed of lands which had been historically controlled by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. It sought to unite the Southern (SerboCroatian: yugo) Slavs into a single national state, ruled from Belgrade by the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty. The three ethnicities mentioned above were the most numerous in the various iterations of the Yugoslav state, and the relations between them would shape the fate of this project.
For each of the groups I will delineate where they live, their religion, the languages they speak (spoiler: they’re all the same language but with different names for political reasons), WWII activities, naming conventions, and most important football clubs pertaining to these ethnicities. This will provide the reader with all the context required to understand the narrative at hand, and—if they so desire—to dive deeper into the ever-fascinating history of the Balkans.
Serbs: Serbs are a predominantly Eastern Orthodox South Slavic ethnic group. They live in all the ex-Yugoslavian countries, but primarily Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Serbo-Croatian: BiH), and Montenegro. They speak Serbian, which is mutually intelligible with the rest of the SerboCroatian (henceforth SH, short for srpskohrvatski) dialects. The primary Serb paramilitary organization in WWII was the Chetniks (SH: Četnici), who variously fought with and for the Nazis, Allies, and Italians, and committed various atrocities against Bosniaks and Croats. Serbs also composed a large portion of the Yugoslav Partisans, the political party which freed the country from fascist rule. They tend to have more classically Slavic names such as Dragana, Bogdan, Miloš, Milica, and Miroslav. The two Serbian clubs discussed here are Red Star Belgrade (SH: Crvena Zvezda) and Partizan Belgrade. Red Star was founded in 1945 by members of the Serbian United Antifascist Youth League, and quickly became the most successful and popular team in Serbia. They are often seen as the representative of the Serbian nation as a whole. Their supporters are known as delije (which roughly translates to “heros”), and their colors are red and white. Partizan was founded in 1945 by officers of the Yugoslav People’s Army (SH: Jugoslavenska narodna armija, or JNA for short) and is named after the Partisans, precursors to the JNA. Partizan players historically were enlisted in the army during their time on the team. They came to represent the Yugoslav army and the national project. Their supporters are known as grobari (SH: grave-diggers), and their colors are black and white.
Croats: Croats are a predominantly Roman Catholic South Slavic ethnic group. They live primarily in Croatia and BiH. They speak Croatian, which is mutually intelligible with the rest of the SH dialects. During WWII, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was set up as a puppet state of Nazi Germany, and was governed by the fascist Ustaše organization. The Ustaše were responsible for the extermination of 340,000 Serbs, 30,000 Jews, and 30,000 Roma, as well as the expulsion of a further 300,000 Serbs. At the same time, Croats—including future Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito—were the second largest component of the Partisans. Croatian names tend to be Biblical or derived from Latin, such as Luka, Marta, Marko, and Lucija. The two Croatian teams discussed here are Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split. Dinamo is the successor club of Građanski Zagreb, which was founded in 1911 and disbanded in 1945 due to its wartime participation in the national football league
of the NDH. Dinamo was founded in the same year, and inherited the players, colors, administration, fanbase, and stadium of the now defunct team. As the most successful Croatian team, they are often seen to represent the Croatian nation as a whole. Their color is blue, which is reflected in the name of their supporter group: the Bad Blue Boys. Hajduk Split was founded in 1911 and was named after the bandits who fought against the Ottoman Empire. After the annexation of Split by the Italians in 1941, the club ceased operations, refusing to participate in the Italian football league, however it was reconstituted by the Partisans in 1944. They are seen to represent the coastal regions of Croatia. Their supporter group is the Torcida, and their colors are white and blue. Bosniaks: Bosniaks are a primarily Sunni Muslim South Slavic ethnic group. They live in BiH, as well as in parts of Serbia and Montenegro. They speak Bosnian, which is mutually intelligible with the rest of the SH dialects. During WWII, BiH was annexed by the NDH, and since Bosniaks were considered to be Islamized Croats, they were largely spared from the genocidal focus of the Ustaše. Bosniaks did not have a national militia, but some were recruited into various militias such as the SS Handschar Division (many of whom orchestrated a mutiny while stationed in southern France, joining the French Resistance). As with the other people of Yugoslavia, Bosniaks also fought among the ranks of the Partisans. Bosniak names often derive from Arabic or Turkish, such as Hamza, Esma, Semir, and Ajša. The two Bosniak teams discussed here are FK Sarajevo and Velež Mostar. FK Sarajevo was founded in 1946 by Partisans (initially as a team of metal-workers). Due to Sarajevo’s diverse ethnic makeup, the club historically espoused the socialist and multi-ethnic virtues of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Their color is maroon and their supporter group is known as Horde zla (SH: Hordes of evil). Velež Mostar was founded as a worker’s club in 1922, and was dissolved by the Yugoslav government for its socialist leanings and political involvement in 1940. It was reformed in 1945 after the end of the war, and continued to be one of the most ideologically left-leaning clubs in the country. Its colors are red and white and its fans are known as the Red Army.
I recognize this was a lot of information at once, and I implore the reader to return to this section if they ever get lost in the myriad names, organizations, and ethnicities composing this narrative.
FOOTBALL BETWEEN THE
In the early decades of the 20th century, various football clubs were founded across Yugoslavia. Some were founded by students emulating trends elsewhere in Europe (such as Hajduk Split), others as left-leaning workers’ clubs (such as Velež Mostar and RNK Split), as well as many “ethnic” clubs, primarily Croatian.
All this posed problems for the Yugoslav Football Association (JNS), which had to navigate delicate ethnic tensions alongside fundamental disagreements about how the league should be run. Croatian and Slovenian delegates advocated for a federated league, whereas Serbian representatives insisted on a single national league. At the time, football was a largely bourgeois game, and the JNS sought to curtail the formation of workers’ clubs. This suppression culminated in the JNS dissolving Velež Mostar in 1940 after a game against the Montenegrin FK Crna Gora Podgorica ended in a popular demonstration by the Mostar fans against fascism. Their fears would prove to be not unfounded; Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941.
“The date is May 4, 1980, and the floodlights illuminate a packed stadium. A grim silence has suddenly taken hold. Hajduk Split players stand tearfully alongside their Red Star guests, some of whom have been immobilized by shock. Comrade Tito is dead. The 50,000-strong crowd spontaneously bursts into a chant: ‘Comrade Tito, we swear an oath to you, that we will not deviate from your path!’”
Following the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, the country was partitioned between Germany, Italy, the NDH, a quisling Serbian government, Hungary, and assorted Balkan Nazi collaborators. The football scene of the former Yugoslavian lands was quickly made to conform to the fascist ideologies of the new rulers. Clubs which did not already represent the Croatian people in the NDH were “Croatized,” leading to the ban of Jewish, Serbian, and Communist participation in football. Matches in the NDH began with the referee shouting the Ustaše slogan of “za dom” (SH: for the homeland), to which the players and fans responded with a Nazi salute and “spremni” (SH: ready). Many Yugoslav teams refused to participate in the reorganized fascist leagues of the Nazi puppet states, especially the Communist-affiliated workers’ teams (many of whom had been banned regardless). Members of these workers’ teams provided an important base for Partisan organization. One such example is RNK Split, who lost many members attempting to escape Italian-occupied Split.
Another club from Split came to be the face of the Yugoslav Partisans. Although traditionally a bourgeois club, Hajduk Split’s refusal to participate in the Italian league led to its dissolution. Many of its players went on to join the Partisans, and the leadership of the movement realized the revolutionary potential of being represented on the international stage by Hajduk, the two-time Yugoslav champions who had refused to collaborate with the fascists. After reforming in 1944, Hajduk went on an international footballing campaign, winning 11 out of its first 16 matches.
At the same time, the Partisans, led by the head of the pre-war Communist party leader Josip Broz Tito, were making major advances against fascist forces. Tito, however, faced a problem of legitimacy; although his forces had liberated by far the most territory from the various fascist polities in the area, the UK-based exile government of the monarchy was internationally recognized as the legitimate ruler of Yugoslavia. By representing the Partisans as delegates of Yugoslavia on the international footballing stage, Hajduk thus bolstered their legitimacy as its sole representative.
This culminated in a match against a team composed of the crème de la crème of the British army in the Italian port city of Bari. The game had the air of an international matchup, with the new star-embossed Yugoslav tricolor flying proudly alongside the Union Jack. The fact that Hajduk lost 7-2 to the British mattered far less than the recognition Tito’s Yugoslavia had gained through this game. Hajduk would continue its tour with games in Malta, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, all the while increasing the legitimacy of the Partisan movement. The liberation of Split was christened by a rematch between Hajduk and the British, the Croatian side securing a 1-0 victory. They also played a game against the newly-founded Red Star Belgrade, a moment which symbolized the ultimate Partisan victory. Out of the deepest ethnic divisions of WWII, the “Brotherhood
and Unity” of Tito’s Yugoslavia united two teams–one Croat and one Serbian–in the national struggle for a socialist Yugoslavia.
THE YUGOSLAV WAY, THE THIRD WAY
Following the end of WWII, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia would go about reshaping the footballing pyramid based on revolutionary ideals. The first order of business was to dissolve all “collaborating” teams, i.e. those which had continued playing in the leagues of fascist states (although some of the larger ones were simply reformed under a different name, such as Dinamo Zagreb). Many new socialist and workers’ teams were formed all around the country, invigorated by the revolutionary zeal of Partisan victory. Teams were expected to be managed on the principles of workers’ self-management (a core tenet of Tito’s ideology), and its players educated in socialist theory and material dialectics. Despite this new revolutionary streak, latent ethnic tensions sometimes flared up, with Serbs and Croats often respectively accusing each other of being Ustaše and Četnici.
The international scene also provided its own challenges and rewards. Heightening YugoslavSoviet tensions led to Tito leaving the Cominform and founding the Non-Aligned Movement alongside India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel-Nasser. This orientation towards the “Third World” led the Yugoslav football association to take an interest in developing footballing infrastructure in such countries. Yugoslav coaches and trainers would contribute to the development of football in Algeria, Indonesia, Kuwait, Iran, Tunisia, Greece, and Sudan (among many other countries). The rewards of this new orientation were heralded by a series of two matches during the 1952 Finland Olympics. Yugoslavia played the Soviet Union in Tampere, and let a 5-1 lead slip through their fingers as the game ended 5-5. This lapse was atoned for two days later with a 3-1 Yugoslav victory. This triggered jubilant celebrations by Yugoslavs and Finns alike, the latter of whom carried the players off the pitch and thronged the street chanting “Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia.” The defeat to Hungary in the final did not dampen the sweetness of this victory.
Despite successes in the national and international scenes, cracks in the Yugoslav footballing project began to appear in the following decades. Many of these issues were carried over from pre-war times: Croatian teams and footballing bodies felt like they were marginalized in favor of Serbian teams closer to the center of power in Belgrade. One such example was Partizan, which—although it was a multi-ethnic team composed of the best footballers of the JNA—was seen as having taken the best Croatian talents in the service of bolstering Belgrade football. Additionally, the misapplication of self-management principles and debates around the professionalization of the league led to rampant corruption.
All of this would soon be overshadowed by a national tragedy of an unprecedented scale. The date is May 4, 1980, and the floodlights illuminate a packed stadium. A grim silence has suddenly taken hold. Hajduk Split players stand tearfully alongside their Red Star guests, some of whom have been immobilized by shock. Comrade Tito is dead. The 50,000strong crowd spontaneously bursts into a chant: “Comrade Tito, we swear an oath to you, that we will not deviate from your path!” The match would be abandoned in the 41st minute, and just as a meeting between Hajduk and Red Star inaugurated the establishment of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the same fixture nearly 35 years later inaugurated the beginning of the end.
If one club were said to best represent the ideals of FSR Yugoslavia, it would have to be Velež Mostar, a socialist workers’ club in a multi-ethnic town which lost everything resisting fascism. Their victory in the 1981 Marshal Tito Cup thus honored the memory of the late comrade in a fitting manner.
This embodiment of the ideals of brotherhood and unity did not restore stability to Yugoslavia, however. It was simply a bucking of the more general trend of the decade of economic downturn and flaring ethnic tensions. Rising unemployment among Yugoslav youth and nationalist polarization gave football matches a new political edge. Violence before, during, and after matches grew increasingly common, facilitated by the formation of organized fan groups based on those in Italy and England. These fan groups proved to be breeding grounds for extremist ideologies; while in previous years fans insultingly accused each other of being Ustaše and Četnici, Red Star’s delije sang the praises of Četnik leader Draža Mihailović just as Dinamo’s BBB glorified Ustaše head Ante Pavelić.
Some teams continued to cling to Yugoslav identity despite the increasingly divisive nationalist currents. FK Sarajevo was one such example, whose Horde zla often displayed banners such as “Yugoslav by nationality,” rejecting the exclusionary politics of other supporters’ groups. Even these clubs were occasionally pulled into the vortex of an ethnically-charged conflict, as when FK Sarajevo traveled to Novi Sad in Serbia’s ethnically diverse Vojvodina region. They were met with chants such as “From Sarajevo to Iran, there will be no Muslims,” to which they responded by insulting Vojvodina’s various ethnic groups in turn.
Although the Maksimir incident is viewed by many as the inflection point for Yugoslav football, there would continue to be an entire season of football following the incident. However, the political situation during that year deteriorated quickly. The election of Croatian nationalist parties led Serb majority villages in Croatia to expel all Croatian police and military, the memory of Ustaše atrocities against Serbs at the forefront of their mind. At the same time political manipulation by Serbian nationalist president Slobodan Milošević led to the deterioration of the Yugoslav federal government. These tensions came to a culmination a week before the Marshal Tito Cup final between Hajduk and Red Star.
A contingent of Croatian police officers attempting to raise the Croatian flag in the Serb-majority village of Borovo was met with gunfire from local Serbs, leading to 12 deaths. In memory of those killed, the Hajduk players showed up to the final sporting black armbands. In a matchup that seemed to recurringly be laden with symbolism, Hajduk proved victorious and lifted the national cup for the
final time. Red Star also ended their Yugoslav history with a bang. During the 1990-91 season, they first beat Rangers, then Dynamo Dresden, and finally Bayern Munich, to face Olympique de Marseille in the European Cup final. The game ended in a draw, with Red Star overcoming the French team in penalties. The Yugoslav outfit were champions of Europe, and with their victory over the Chilean Colo-Colo in the Intercontinental Cup four months later, they were arguably the best in the world.
As Yugoslavia fell apart and into war, football was dragged into the conflict. Many of the incipient nations sought to create national football leagues as demonstrations of their independence, while members of supporters’ groups headed to the frontline to fight for what they believed was the survival of their peoples. In BiH especially, the internecine violence had the greatest impact on football. Velež Mostar was expelled from their stadium by Croatian nationalist forces, with the newly reformed HŠK Zrinjski Mostar taking its place (47 years after having been banned for participating in the Ustaše football league). Football in Sarajevo was brought to a complete halt as the city was placed under siege. Just over a month after the Markale market massacre, where Serb shelling left 68 dead and 144 wounded, an exhibition match between a representation of Sarajevo resident and UN peacekeepers temporarily brought normalcy back to a city in a time of genocide. Just two days after winning the Yugoslav Cup with Partizan, Bosniak coach Ivica Osim resigned from the management of both Partizan and the Yugoslav national team to return to his native Sarajevo. The Yugoslav dream had finally died.
THE GRASS ON THE OTHER SIDE: GREENER?
Metastaze (2009) is a Croatian movie which follows a group of delinquent friends from the dilapidated neighborhood of Novi Zagreb. They are variously afflicted with drug addiction, alcoholism, PTSD, and unemployment. Their one unifying factor is their love for Dinamo Zagreb. In one scene, the most extreme of them is seen performing the fascist Ustaše salute of “Za dom, spremni” during a Dinamo match. Even after independence and freedom from the perceived Yugoslav yoke, the economic and social factors which led to organization of fanatical supporters’ groups and the fermentation of extremist ideologies within had not yet disappeared. The nationalist politics which had been harnessed against the “other” now had no direction except inwards. To this day, supporters’ groups often harken back to problematic figures in their past as representatives of their respective ethnicity’s “golden age”.
Given an upswing in the economic and footballing fronts since then, this ethnic nostalgia has become outdated. The exploits of the Croatian national team, captained by the balon-d’or-winning midfield maestro
Luka Modrić, have cemented the ex-Yugoslav nation as a force to reckoned with: in 2018 they reached the World Cup finals, and were knocked out in the semis by eventual winners Argentina in 2022. More interestingly, some in the former Yugoslavia have begun grappling with the role played by football in their history. ZG80 (2016) is a prequel to Metastaze, which follows the cast of characters from the 2009 movie on a trip to Belgrade for a Dinamo-Red Star derby in a sort of reverse Maksimir riot. The tone is lighthearted and features a Dinamo fan handcuffed to a Red Star supporter as a comedic subplot. Many of the jokes lie in the absurdity of the situation both in football and in Yugoslavia itself at the time. That this is possible is a hopeful sign that the ideologies that gripped the people of this region and led them to bloodshed are of the past. Their inherent messiness and contradictions are to be laughed at, instead of driving to violence. In all this ideological turbulence, however, ethnopolitics will continue to play out on the pitch.
HISHAM AWARTANI B’25 is the proud owner of a Yugoslavia national team football jersey.
c A crown of braids takes on a life of its own. It offers stability and strength. In many African homes, including mine, love is expressed through physical gestures of care. I recall the gentle way my mother used to oil my hair, row by row. The simple act of her peeling and feeding me beles, my favorite Eritrean fruit. Most of all, how my mother used to braid my hair every two to three weeks and how I could feel the painful yet delicate process of weaving as evidence of her everlasting love.
c Worlds do not tell you anything.
A yellow-brown stained birch leaf, clipped from its perch by the October wind, swings on its path through mist. One final rightward swoop, and it lands, rocks, and settles on the dark wooden railing of a river-crossing bridge. Below, the river flows fast, smoothing the stones beneath it. As the lifeblood of the forest, the river sustains what lives around it, and within it.
Above, a sweet blue sky soars, broken only by cloud and swaying branch, each arm surfaced with swaying leaves of its own. From where this one leaf came, there is no way of knowing. For any of these trees, or any of those, could have birthed this everthin parcel of land.
And on the top-left corner of this autumn leaf sits the world. This world, specifically, takes the form of a simple drop of water, deposited by the river, or a drip from a branch. Inside this world is a fast oasis, a mesh of sustenance and safety. Inside of this world is brutish hell, terrific struggle, an unclear, unfair babel. Inside of this drop of water is an ecosystem, and all of its members.
Bacteria, protozoa, amoeba, helminths. Algae, phytoplankton, viruses, archaea. These smallest forms of life, most single-celled, exist in this place together. This drop of cool water, held together by the propensity of things to hold together, is, right now, for these thousands upon thousands of beings, the only thing that matters.
Each one has a role. The algae and phytoplankton absorb sunlight and spit oxygen into the water. They sit among the bacteria, who feed upon decay, the remnants of things past. Helminths are parasitic and need an animal to feed upon, so they bide their time. They can’t accomplish much in here.
But around them, frenzy. Protozoa surround the algae and bacteria, they absorb and dissolve, they piece the bodies apart and build them into their own. Amoeba, lumbering giants, float and consume and divide, one becoming two, each sent off to find its prey. It’ll take a protozoan if it can.
Life and death, creation and destruction and creation anew. Hunting and fleeing, inside of this drop of water, that sits upon a leaf.
This world can never last. It clings to its ephemeral existence with whitened fingers, the expectation of nothingness, or everythingness, eternal. A wandering wind or a wandering hand or a resting insect could send the leaf tumbling down, down, down into the river below, and the world, this world, would cease to exist.
Those inside might know no difference. No eyes, no ears, they may know things but we know not what. They learn things, perhaps, they do things, they must do things, they eat things and they go where there is food to eat. Their senses are not like ours, probably.
For now, though they might not know it, these creatures are dome creatures, they are pearl creatures and floating creatures, they do not care for the planet because they are too small, or it is too big. Everything they need is here. Everything they need is everything they have.
Down comes another leaf, this one from an oak, a white oak, all curves and crisp. It lays still on the rail, and, not weighed down by anything at all, soon falls, patiently, to the river below. The leaf is ripped from its gentle arc by the brush and the bellow, jerked
underwater and coasted away from its tree. Water spins light into tapestry, ornate and vital; the leaf gleams even as it flows away. Over rocks and under falls, past the ochre yellow and the ochre brown, past the root and the white water. It travels not of its own volition but of the river’s. It will be set downstream, when the river sees to it.
Next, a blue-crested bird, a jay, perches next to this birch leaf, and its water. The bird peers across the wood, unbothered by the humans walking near; it is faster, it knows. Limited eye movement forces the jay to turn its entire head: right, and down—left, and up. A breath. A flash of feather, a rush of feather, a gap in the air where that body had been.
All in a blink, a moment. This forest has lived so long. It has seen many leaves on many trees, many young trees on many stone-strewn hillsides. The woods have seen billions, trillions of feet move across its ground. Shoed, clawed, bare as a bone.
The woods have seen uncountable worlds formed and shattered, replaced and shattered again. The forest is an existence, and it holds existence in its palms.
The drop sits, still, on the top-left corner of the yellow birch leaf. Still, it is all there is.
A great golden digger wasp, great and golden indeed, with a black end and two globes for eyes, descends, elegant and fresh, to rest on the leaf. For a second, maybe, a ripple of air is pushed from its wings and passes over the surface of the drop. The wasp brings its forelegs to its face, takes its time, cleans itself, its eyes and mouth, its antennae. Its body is tight and secure, you can’t see it breathe, it doesn’t move its head to look around.
When the wasp decides to take flight once again, it pushes its delicate legs against the leaf, bats its wings, ascends. The force moves the leaf ever so slightly towards the edge of the railing, not too close, but closer than it had been. Closer to the end of the world.
And all it takes for this world to finally come falling down is a small wind. The same wind that placed the leaf on the edge of the rail, that caressed the jay and the wasp into flight, that carried the pollen that birthed the tree.
As the leaf descends to the water, it overturns, and swings wide to the right. The underside is paler, and the deep-blue veins can be seen branching across the surface, mimicking the tree it came from. The pearl of water sticks fast, flattened slightly by the pressure of the air. The rightward tip of the leaf catches the wind, scoops upwards, and swings back to the left. Ripples force their way across the water; it stretches and pushes and condenses and folds. And inside, still, the world remains, holding fast to its own existence, those inside floating amongst themselves. The leaf overturns, and sunlight pierces the world once again, reflecting and refracting and opening. Those algae and phytoplankton that can catch the light do so, and feed themselves.
The world is falling, and its creatures don’t know it. It passes a clear-winged dragonfly, who moves out of the way. It passes pollen and fungal spores, each on their way somewhere, possessed with the capacity to build. It passes birch leaves, carried by that same wind, each carrying their own small, perfectly round drops of water, each rippling and stretching and glinting. Together, hundreds of worlds fall.
The planet rises to meet the fall, and the river touches the water. The leaf spins, clockwise, fast, flips over, and over again. The world opens, the world expands and spills. The world empties and its creatures are allowed to fly. They spread forever, pushed and pulled to relative nowhere.
Algae, phytoplankton, viruses, archaea. Bacteria, protozoa, amoeba, helminths. Oh, a universe, here, infinitely bigger than the world and yet the exact same size. Over pebbles, boulders, branches and logs and roots, pounding and hissing and screaming. Chaos, or serenity—what, after all, for a single cell, is the difference?
A fall and a spray of droplets, up up up up up up. One finds a grain of sand, another a feather. One finds a fallen birch leaf, brown-yellow-stained and crisp, where it can spend the rest of its existence. Inside, creatures spin and collide until they find their rest. They are as they always will be, as they always have been.
Worlds do not tell you anything. They exist for billions of years or they exist for seconds. They span infinity and then some or only a few so significant millimeters. They can be everything, they must be everything, but they are fragile and ephemeral and innumerable all the same.
On a red maple tree that lives on the bank of the river, a leaf quakes, and falls. All angles and flame, at the end of its life of service to the tree that birthed it. It finds a rock of gray-white-speckled granite. It is still. A breeze, and the leaf shifts. A second, and on its bottom-right corner the river and the air place a drop of water. It sits there, a seed of light, and waits.
A young child in his bright red rain boots, exploring the woods for the very first time, steps onto the rock.
“Be careful,” his mother warns.
He looks back, and then down at the leaf under his feet.
He bends at the knees, takes the stem of the leaf in his hands, and rises.
He brings the leaf to his face, and, for a minute, looks into the perfect dome of water on its surface.
He can almost see his own eyes looking back.
He turns his head toward his mother. She nods. He turns back and places the leaf into the water, and watches as it floats and dips and dances and flies down, down, down.
CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW B’25 wants to hang out with a tardigrade.
This past summer, I tried to read Atlas Shrugged. It was only after I told everyone about the big, big book I was reading (they must’ve thought me so smart) that I realized, 50 pages in, how much I did not care for it. Ayn Rand’s thousand-page epic of the rugged American libertarianism that is the unawakened wolf within us did not tickle my fancy. To be fair, I didn’t know what I was getting into, my only gauge prior to reading being my grandmother’s stamp of approval and the vague intrigue that accompanies anything controversial. Nonetheless, Atlas Shrugged has been on my shelf for months, far from its home in the Rock stacks (Floor B, Row 62A, Item: PS3535.A54 A8 1963, to be exact). Like the many trinkets and idols in my bedroom—among them the Sonny Angel I swear moved in my periphery the other day—the book’s cover, its illustration of Atlas buckled under the weight of the heavens, has started occupying my subconscious. I close my eyes and I see his three-point stance, globe atop his shoulders, and the cubist dream of an American city in the background. I imagine myself Atlas, unyielding as I suffer my divine punishment. You see, Indie, too, is burdened.
I need you to picture this: my formidable charisma, the soft, orange-pink glow that surrounds me wherever I go, the birds that chirp in my ear, bringing me news and questions from far and wide. Now this: Palo Santo, a conversation pit hidden behind a wall that’s only revealed if you can press the right tile, the mournful drone of a bassoon, faint in the distance. These are the shortlist standouts of the qualities that constitute who Indie is. And I’m ever so glad. You know, I’ve never wanted to be anyone but who I am. But here’s what I’m getting at. Indie is the comforting vessel for the voices of the many, and she is getting tired.
Indie has concluded that she is not the DUFF, nor the mom, nor the Samantha of the group. Indie is Atlas. But instead of the sky and the heavens, which I’d be so down to hold forever, I am condemned to hold the secrets and burdens of those around me. They will sit on the copper-infused silk cushion I got as a gift from somebody very important, and we will hold hands, and Indie listens, nods, and smiles knowingly. Where does that leave me, though, as anything but keeper, keyholder, and sage, all at once? But no! Do not allow yourself to become resentful, to become one single thing. Knowing the multitudes of those around you and carrying the tender pieces of their heart on the tip of your pinky is a gift we mustn’t take for granted, no matter how dense that pinky speck becomes. I mean, to be honest, wasn’t Atlas the lucky one? How many of us get to be that close to heaven—to carry it on our shoulders? How many get to live their lives upholding the one cardinal truth there is, that this world is where we all are? Maybe it isn’t even that deep. Whatever man, Atlas shrugged. You can, too. Indie’s gonna keep holding on.
IKNOWASEARSECRETTHATCOULD FROZENEVENTHEMOST OFSTAKES.
i n d i e n e v e r daer
Beefy Tomato,
Through the arduous process of self-discovery, Indie has learned that she loves knowing and, subsequently, sharing. In the waves of life, there are currents that unite us all. Broadly, that The Perks of Being a Wallflower was important for some reason or another; the winter is too long; and 20k right now would fix everything. But the smallest units of connection, the ones that bring two people together in love and trust and happiness, are the things we share of ourselves. Precious information that we encode beneath layers of sarcasm. Truths given away with the scoff of nonchalance that proves we are above it all. That this, too, may be a secret, but we are so beyond caring. Once you’re inducted into this cult of knowing, you don’t get to feel the heat of a fresh new secret. Custom deems we must accept a secret with grace and wisdom. We must lock it tightly in a jewelry box and ensure that we never hear the plucky tune of the ballerina’s song that plays when opened. But what happens when the tides change? What happens when your stakeholders are no longer who you think they are? Can you afford to sear their precious stakes? Suddenly, the great big gong in your brain is ringing incessantly to alert you to this single nugget of secrecy. It is the single huddled mass. It is yearning to be free and you feel it slipping from your grasp with each second of increased relevance. Like a surprise $5 found in an old coat pocket, a good secret will begin to burn a hole in your pocket if you cannot cool it down and make it unimportant in its own right. To render a secret trivial you must deflate it like milk from the 50s. Flood the system, overwrite the memory, drown out the wail of a secret that is not yours with information of your own. Indie has discovered the foolproof measure to escape the sticky secret situation, and it’s by putting your own business on front street so that nobody knows what to think, where to look, and how all those ants got here. If you swirl the zeitgeist with enough chaff you’ll soon realize that the droning is largely your own. It’s like how they give kids with eczema mittens. Mitigate the damage, embrace yourself. You’ll find it a whole lot easier that way.
HOW DO I LIVE AUDACIOUSLY, BOLDLY, & SPARKLINGLY MYSELF? – INCANDESCENT BULB
Incandescent Bulb,
If you give a bulb a shimmer, he’ll gleam for a day.
But if you teach a bulb to glimmer, he’ll shine himself away. I was talking with a friend recently about what authenticity means in practice. She wanted to know what percentage of the time we were being our true selves. I couldn’t answer her question because how can one quantify ‘true’ self, when all we ever do is live in our true bodies? Go about our true lives? When I pushed my friend about this, she emphasized not the truths we hide from others—which are normal and necessary and a function of being I do not think inauthentic—but the ones we hide from ourselves. It would be near impossible to show the world the burning inner core of yourself at all moments. The flame of spirit would flicker in the brisk Providence wind. It would get damp. But internal secrets? How many do you have? How many do you not even know about? The border between truth and authenticity is a measure of your own endurance for pressure. As Atlas carried the heavens upon his shoulders, we all must bear the burden of knowing—or not knowing—who we are, always. Have you ever stepped outside and been surprised to find that the temperature is exactly that of your body? The world is always really quiet for some reason so the only way you can differentiate between in and out is by reading the visual cues telling you so? On a spiritual level, that is exactly what cloistering truths from yourself feels like. As if you’ve stepped outside, so something is fundamentally different, but you refuse to open your eyes to see exactly what’s going on. If the weight of the world—the trees and Honda Accords and the way you actually feel about that one person—will make your knees wobble and collapse, you can close your eyes and keep believing you never left the four walls of your comfy interiority. But once something is true, you cannot make it false again. There is no way to unscramble an egg. So my advice to you is this: Open your eyes! Explore the dark alleys of your aorta. Grow strong so that, when the time comes, you know that you have not only endured the unending reality of the self, but you have raised it high above your head for as long as you can. Bridge the gap of truth and authenticity, and you’ll find that you shine brighter than the light section of Home Depot.
Community
PPA petition for Brown Health Services to offer abortion medication to students
Planned Parenthood Advocates of Brown (PPA) is petitioning Health Services to offer medication abortion to students, and we’re asking for your support. Given the uncertainty around abortion access nationwide, it is essential that Brown takes this step to ensure safe, timely reproductive healthcare. This will reduce the burden on local clinics and the Providence community—an obligation that Brown must begin to take seriously.
Arts
SB + Scaffolding + So Over It + Glitter concert
Fri. February 14, 2025
7:30 PM-11:55 PM
AS220 Main Stage 115 Empire Street
Writers on Writing Reading Series — Lauren
Francis Sharma
Sat. February 20, 2025
5:30 PM
McCormack Family Theater, Room 132 70 Brown St.
International Women’s Day Call for Art
The Sarah Doyle Center is accepting visual art submissions for International Women’s Day
Due Sat. February 21, 2025
Events @ Brown
Student and Staff Art Exhibits at the Granoff Center
Check out the Brown | RISD Dual Degree exhibition “—ing” and the Annual Staff Art exhibition before they leave Granoff on Sunday and Wednesday, respectively!
Mutual Aid & Community Action
Overdose Prevention & Prevention Training Workshop dedicated to training to prevent drug overdose! Sign up for one of many workshops this spring.
Queer + Trans Mutual Aid
QTMA is “a small mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence, RI area volunteer-run by a small group of queer + trans white and non-Black POC.” Donations can be made @ PayPal qtma.pvd@gmail.com // Venmo @qtma-pvd
Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund
This fund provides financial support to sex workers statewide with priority for BIPOC and trans sex workers who have been impacted by housing instability. Due to a lack of funds, the Ocean State Fund has had to close temporarily. Donations can be made @ https://oceanstateadvocacy.org/donate-2/
Down
1. Faithful columnist you might have aired your Valentine’s Day woes to 2. Brown students were toiling over these. Due on Feb 2
3. Weather event you might be getting tired of at this point
4. Pretty good on toast
Across (might be backwards)
1. Oddly hallway-shaped restaurant, worst place to get taken to on Valentine’s Day 2. “I would be _____ not to mention”
3. Something you ate with chips/wings on Super Bowl Sunday Diagonal
1. The only DJ you will ever find (and need), frequents Andrews + ERC 2. Second most common last name in the world
After nearly a year of bargaining and mediation, the Labor Organization of Community Coordinators (LOCC) has officially ratified its contract with Brown University. Among pay increases and other member benefits, the contract creates a Labor Management Committee. This committee is intended to be a longstanding facet of the contract and serve to set the foundation for relations between the university and CCs. According to Anna Ryu, an organizer with LOCC involved in the ratification of the new contract, the Labor Management Committee (LMC) serves to build the Community Coordinator position into the future and ensure compliance with the new contract. Consisting of both union members and university representatives, the committee is now focusing on putting the terms of the contract in place from a logistical standpoint.
Issues like clear communication of workers’ rights, disbursement of backpay for current CCs, and the full integration of CCs into the local have taken precedence in LMC meetings of late. On the docket for LMC meetings is the integration of union member input into the written duties of the CC position. Formal student-worker input into the building of the CC role has long been lacking in the relationship between student-workers and ResLife. As the union comes off a long fought battle for a fair contract, LOCC members hope to use the LMC to bring the union into the future and build out a fair position of employment for the next academic year and beyond.
Like some of you, I too am a prolific eater. There comes a point—approximately two weeks into the semester— when it is impossible to eat another Ratty turkey patty. Thus, I have taken on the task of seeking out food around Providence and relaying my thoughts to you, dear reader.
It was a dark and stormy night when Jolie Barnard B’26 and I decided to seek out something with which to warm our bellies. It hit me. FLAMES. The sign, towering over Eddy St., implied something inside would certainly be “fire.” Upon entry, we observed portraits of the Kennedys and a particularly discerning pop art depiction of Abraham Lincoln. Gazing up at the menu (correctly accompanied by pictures of the food), we deliberated long and hard over the choices in front of us and decided on the meal combo with oxtail, an extra order of curried goat, and jerk rice. We were also kindly gifted free fried Jamaican dumplings!
If you are looking for authentic Jamaican food in Providence, Flames is the place to go. The oxtail quite literally falls off the bone. The perfectly spiced marinade and the unique cut of meat create an exciting mouthfeel . The cohesion of the oxtail with the goat was remarkable, a well-balanced bite served to show off the excellence of each facet of the meal and highlight the rare combination of flavors that Flames so expertly provides.
Visit Flames on 734 Eddy St.!
Eat you again soon!
NATALIE SVOB B’27