Volume 48 - Issue 5

VOL 48 / ISS 5 / APRIL 2016

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N YA L E & N E W H AV E N

editors-in-chief elena saavedra buckley isabelle taft managing editor spencer bokat-lindell senior editors sophie haigney yi-ling liu aaron mak david rossler associate editors ruby bilger victorio cabrera eliza fawcett amelia nierenberg aaron orbey natalie yang copy editors griffin brown philippe chlenski harry gray rohan naik douglas plume

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

with support from

design editors allison primak ivy sanders schneider illustrators alejandro nodarse allison primak ivy sanders schneider photo editors elinor hills jennifer lu web designer mariah xu web developer philippe chlenski

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 48 issue 5 april 2016

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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critical angle OF HOUSE AND HOME A student activist finds her place in the history of Black organizing at Yale.

Eshe Sherley

standards 4

points of departure AUTHENTICITY ON TAP — Chris Cappello YOU ARE WHAT YOU WEAR — Lora Kelley IT TAKES A TEMPLE — Rohan Naik

10 snapshot

VANISHING WINCHESTER — Isabelle Taft

An urban explorer documents the former gun factory before

it transforms 14 snapshot

LET’S TALK ABOUT SPEECH — Eleanor Womack

A flashy “free speech debate” takes the stage 18 profile

THE MAGIC FOOT OF HONDO COLWICK — Maya Averbuch

A prosthetics craftsman makes what he knows 22

personal essay ONE LITTLE ROOM, AN EVERYWHERE — Hayley Byrnes Remembering what I wanted

34 feature

TLAXCALA DREAMS OF NEW HAVEN — Sebi Medina-Tayac

On stage, mothers find a hole in the border to visit their

migrant children 41 endnote

WHAT’S IN A GAME — Elena Saavedra Buckley

Finding New Haven in BORDERLANDS, pistol in hand

P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

AUTHENTICITY ON TAP Can Three Sheets create a “gastrodive” for everyone?

Chris Cappello

illustration ivy sanders schneider

“Brunch hasn’t worked out for us, so we do lunch,” says Rick Seiden, founder of the New Haven bar and restaurant Three Sheets. Ed Turschmann, who co-owns the establishment with Seiden, pipes in to clarify. “The menu is the same.” The two men exchange a brief look, as though they have given away the game: what separates their bar from its peers is not offering but attitude. Box 63 does brunch a few blocks down. So does Barracuda. But although a customer inclined towards day drinking can get a burger and a beer around noon on a Sunday at Three Sheets, no one’s going to call it brunch.

Both burly and Connecticut-born, Seiden and Turschmann look like the kind of middle-aged men you wouldn’t want to fight, least of all in their own bar.

When they founded Three Sheets in December 2013 after the previous tenant, Elm Bar, closed up shop, they pledged to bring back the spirit of an older neighborhood institution: Rudy’s Bar and Grille, which occupied their location at 372 Elm Street for seventy-six years before moving to a new space on Chapel. “It felt like the local place that anybody could go,” Seiden says of Rudy’s. “Grad students, fishermen, people from the hospital. The place that everybody felt comfortable 4

coming into.”

When Rudy’s changed location in 2011, it became a “gastropub”—a term, Seiden insists, that doesn’t apply to Three Sheets. “That has a completely different connotation,” he adds, when asked how his bar’s preferred label,“gastrodive,” differs. “This place still has the feel of a local dive bar, but the food that comes out of it is far superior.”

With its blue and red neon sign, grimy brick exterior, and dark-tinted windows, Three Sheets certainly looks like a dive. Seiden and Turschmann, who were both employed in the commercial fishing industry for decades, chose the name from an old sailor’s phrase for drunkenness—“three sheets to the wind.” Above an open doorway, a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign advertises “COLD BEER.” There are no TVs. When I walk into Three Sheets on a weekday night, the atmosphere feels almost utopic. Seiden claims that Three Sheets draws both the “suit and tie crowd” and “the punk rock crowd.” Sure enough, I run into both as I sit at the bar. Next to me, a man with tattoos and gauges reads All The Light We Cannot See over a pint of stout. Two students in Yale apparel are doing homework on laptops at a side table.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

But other elements of the bar seem to contradict the owners’ claims to non-pretension. An illuminated screen shows Chef Kam Tom’s daily kitchen specials, which today feature something called a “butter burger” (twelve dollars, with beef from Four Mile River farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut). A wall-to-wall chalkboard, decked out with illustrations in the style of traditional military tattoos, displays an ever-changing slate of draught beers, most of which cost upwards of $6— steep for a neighborhood like Dwight, and for an establishment that calls itself a dive. It’s unclear, as Three Sheets enters its third year of operations, whether it is defying the winds of change or sailing on them.

— When Seiden and Turschmann were regulars at the original Rudy’s in the early nineties, New Haven’s commercial district looked different. On Broadway alone, you could catch a movie at York Square Cinemas, an independent theater, or browse for records at Cutler’s after grabbing a cheap meal at the Yankee Doodle.

Now, your options are more limited—want to hit the Apple Store this afternoon? How about J. Crew?

The bar scene is different now, too. In 2013, the upscale pub Ordinary replaced Richter’s Bar, a Chapel Street dive that closed in 2011 after twenty-eight years.

Last year, outcry over the closure of the Anchor—a College Street staple for over eighty years—led to a July 2015 proposal to reopen the bar under new management. The New Haven Register reports that the new Anchor will rebrand itself as an “upscale cocktail bar,” a far cry from its origins as a dive.

Although Three Sheets perhaps isn’t a traditional dive bar, its owners see their focus on craft beer and locally sourced food as part of their creative vision rather than the result of a city-wide trend towards the upscale. “I don’t think we’re part of that whole changing scene,” says Seiden. He prefers to think of the bar as an “off-Broadway” operation.

The bar doesn’t feel upscale. “I like that Three Sheets has all this great stuff—a deep beer list, good food—but in an unpretentious space,” says Dan Michelson ’17, a Three Sheets regular. “The bartenders are friendly, the crowd is diverse, and everyone just gets along.” In the back room, I run into Jon Stone, a local singer-songwriter who seems to be drawn to town-gown contact zones. Last year, at a WYBC-sponsored house show, Stone memorably instructed the crowd—roughly split between locals and Yalies—to “paint the floor with Yalie blood.”

No such rancor tonight. He alludes to an altercation at a show at Three Sheets a few weeks back—something involving an aggressive guy in a metal band who’d put back a few too many—but he’s hesitant to get specific.

APRIL 2016

He’s moving to Philadelphia in a couple days, and for now, he just wants to drink beer and play pool, to savor his last moments as an Elm City resident. Three Sheets was the obvious choice for Stone’s impromptu sendoff. “It’s been real,” he’d posted on Facebook earlier that day. “I’ll be at Three Sheets tonight if you wanna hang.”

Turschmann is in charge of the draught lines. Their sixteen spouts gleam under the bar light. “Sixteen lines is good,” he estimates. “I’d rather have twenty, but it’s enough.” He prides himself on providing a diverse

ALTHOUGH A CUSTOMER INCLINED TOWARDS DAY DRINKING CAN GET A BURGER AND A BEER AROUND NOON ON A SUNDAY AT THREE SHEETS, NO ONE’S GOING TO CALL IT BRUNCH.

selection, but he makes sure one beer is always available on tap: Sea Hag, an IPA from Woodbridge, Connecticut.

Why Sea Hag? Turschmann laughs. “That’s like the Budweiser of New Haven,” he says. “If you’re a bar in New Haven and you don’t have Sea Hag…” He trails off, rolling his eyes. “It’s a great local beer,” Seiden clarifies. “Everybody knows it in town, and everybody likes it, pretty much.”

As I sip my pint of Sea Hag, I sense that Seiden’s statement resonates beyond the hoppy drink lapping at my glass’s brim. In its two and a half years at 372 Elm Street, Three Sheets has carved out its own niche within New Haven’s fluctuating nightlife. And yet, Seiden and Turschmann’s hopes for a truly cross-class clientele elude them—it’s hard to imagine that the people drinking at Three Sheets represent most of New Haven. After all, a Sea Hag still runs you six dollars.

— Chris Cappello is a junior in Silliman College

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

YOU ARE WHAT YOU WEAR In an exhibit on Jewish identity, T-shirts become the canvas Lora Kelley

“Yiddish Players Club,” reads a white bro tank on a pink plastic hanger. Its label card defines a Yiddish Player as a “Dreamer. Hustler. Artist. Thinker. Leader.

The ambassador of Yiddish Swag.” “Shalom, Y’all,” another shirt greets. “I <3 Jews,” reads another. It keeps going—college Hillel T-shirts, shirts with delicate Hebrew script, a racy tee with “Jews Do It for Eight Nights” printed over a menorah. These shirts make up the well-traveled art exhibition featured at the American Jewish Historical Society in New York this winter: “Shmattes.”

“Shmattes,” the Yiddish word for “rags” or “garments,” is the brainchild of Anne Grant DIV ’17. The nonprofit art show explores the semiotic value of Jewish-themed T-shirts, focusing specifically on millennial “culturally Jewish” identity. According to Grant, “T-shirts have a lot of data to give us about how Jews— and non-Jews—are negotiating with contemporary Jewish identity,” and also about how comfortable they feel broadcasting their heritage.

After moving to New Haven to work as an arts coordinator at the Jewish Community Center, Grant linked up with the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale to exhibit “Shmattes.” She worked closely with Slifka’s then-curator, Lucy Partman ’14, a current doctoral student in art history at Princeton and an employee of the Jewish Museum in New York. With a couple of others 6

illustration ivy sanders schneider

at Slifka, Partman and Grant curated “T-shirt Talk: The Art of Reimagining Cultural Jewish Identity,” which featured close to seventy shirts and hung on Slifka’s walls in spring 2014. Then, once the shirts had congealed into a show, Grant named her project “Shmattes.” The collection has since traveled to Brown, the University of Virginia, and the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City.

Grant began collecting Jewish T-shirts a few years ago, branching off from her personal five-shirt collection (“One HellUVA Jew” reads one shirt she acquired while pursuing her bachelor’s degree in Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia). While at UVA, where she was involved with the Hillel (the campus center for Jewish life), she recalls, “I had a shirt that said ‘sleep with me’ from a fundraiser where you slept outside for charity. And I thought, ‘Wow, a Hillel is literally sponsoring a T-shirt with a very explicit sexual reference, and not even a disguised reference.’” After getting a shirt with a drug reference from a very old Philadelphia delicatessen, she started to recognize a pattern and began gathering more shirts, on eBay and from friends.

Today, her collection numbers 175 shirts. She displays sixty to eighty in each show.

Grant curates and choreographs “Shmattes” accordTHE NEW JOUR NAL

ing to four main categories. First, T-shirts from university Hillels. She owns thirty or forty of them. Then, cultural appropriation: shirts that combine imagery from other cultures with Jewish themes. “I just was seeing so many T-shirts that were including rap references and hip hop slogans, and imitating the iconography of groups like the Wu-Tang Clan or Lil Wayne,” Grant explained. So shirts that say “Jew-Tang” or have images of Manischewitz wine with the message “Purple Drank” fall into this category. Third: self-aware shirts.

A shirt in this section, as Grant explains, will “make its own utterance of itself” (for example, one red-andgreen shirt reading “Silent Nights Are Boring,” with a blue Star of David printed on it, is in this section). The connecting threads in this category are more conceptual than the others; it is less obvious, from the outside, how these shirts are linked.

Fourth and finally: “Did You Get It?” This section is comprised of T-shirts that demand inside religious knowledge. Grant gives no hints on her label cards. For example, a white ringer T-shirt with red-capped sleeves asks, “DID YOU…?” with a picture of a bench. To an unaware onlooker, the image is a puzzle, but a religious Jew would know that “benching” is a colloquial term for the Birkat Hamazon, an after-meal blessing in Orthodox Jewish households. For those who get it, this

“T-SHIRTS HAVE A LOT OF DATA TO GIVE US ABOUT HOW JEWS—AND NONJEWS—ARE NEGOTIATING WITH CONTEMPORARY JEWISH IDENTITY,” shirt can be a point of connection.

Although this last category focuses on observant Jews, Grant is generally more interested in the concept (and audience) of non-religious Jews who still engage and identify with being culturally Jewish. “If this group of people eats a cheeseburger, and eats prosciutto, and watches TV on Saturday, and they’re still really strongly identifying as Jewish,” she wonders about her culturally Jewish peers, “then what exactly defines them as Jewish?” Grant wants to spark discussion about how, even though some “cultural Jews” break Kosher laws (cheeseburgers and pork are not allowed) and watch TV on Saturdays (electronics are forbidden on APRIL 2016

Shabbat), they display their Judaism publicly in other ways—through certain shirts, for instance, which highlight humorous aspects of Jewish life that have nothing to do with prayers.

The youthful, irreverent nature of “Shmattes” is a cornerstone—and perhaps a drawback—of the show.

When “Shmattes” was displayed at Slifka, Partman recalled that, “People that were using [Slifka] for prayer were concerned, because some of the shirts had very explicit language.” One shirt apparently said the word “fuck” on it. There were complaints, and Partman and Grant ended up turning the offending shirts against the wall. One of Grant’s goals is to look at a distinctly millennial brand of cultural Judaism, so this controversy was only to be expected. She welcomes challenging shirts, and in fact is staging a show at Wesleyan this week that focuses on controversial or provocative Jewish shirts.

Ari Kelman, a board member of the Shmattes nonprofit and the Jim Joseph Professor of Jewish Studies at Stanford, also noticed that many of Grant’s shirts focus on contemporary college life since 2010, even though Jewish T-shirts are neither a brand new nor a necessarily youthful phenomenon. So he donated some of his old Jewish camp T-shirts to Shmattes partly to help “expand the story” that Shmattes was telling about Jewish life.

Kelman notes, too, that plenty of adults with no connection to college Hillels engage with cultural Judaism through designing Jewish T-shirts. Their shirts, rather than emphasizing rap lyrics or frats, play on an inter-generational Jewish humor. Kelman’s friend Sarah Lefton, for example, created a shirt printed with three birch trees and the words “Yo Semite.” Copying a Yosemite shirt, this design cuts at a corner of culturally Jewish people above the twenty-something demographic Shmattes highlights. Stacey Abarbanel, another Shmattes board member, also runs a T-shirt company called “Jewnion Label” in Los Angeles.

Yale’s own LOX ET VERITAS shirt certainly plays to a collegiate crowd, and maybe also to students who don’t always project their religion through shirts.

“Yeah, I think my ‘Lox et Veritas’ shirt is the only Jewish T-shirt I own,” says Partman, laughing. As Kelman reflects, Jewish T-shirts “signal in a couple different directions to show people that you’re in the group.”

Wearing a Jewish shirt, whether you’re a college kid or a middle-aged professor, signals an insider-ness and an access to Jewish life, that can be religious, cultural, or somewhere in between.

— Lora Kelley is a junior in Davenport College 7

P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

IT TAKES A TEMPLE One of the region’s only Hindu temples finds its footing in New Haven Rohan Naik New Haven’s only Hindu temple, Shree Nathji Haveli, was once a banquet hall. Since opening in October 2010, the space has been converted into something of a haven for regional Hindus, who previously had to travel to New Jersey or New York to attend services.

This is not uncommon for Hindu Americans; although I’m not particularly religious, my family often drove an hour to our temple during my childhood in Houston. We had no local center for cultural life like Shree Nathji Haveli, which offers six prayer services a day to an expanding three-hundred-person congregation, one of the four hundred temples in the United States that serve the seven tenth of one percent of the population that is Hindu, according to the Pew Research Center.

Prakash Bhai, meaning “brother Prakash” in Hindi, is a temple trustee. He has a soft-spoken enthusiasm, greying hair, and a mustache. When I visited the temple, he welcomed me into the interior, where statues and prayer spaces still clash with the rusty tables and chairs piled against the walls, remnants of the banquet hall. The old main stage has been refurbished as a brightly adorned pulpit, where a statue of Shree Nathji—the younger manifestation of the Hindu deity Krishna—stands enveloped by white marble.

At a weekly Sunday Paathshala, Hindu education for children in the community, a wiry 7-year-old named Vikram stood on stage with his PowerPoint: “The Logic Behind Hinduism.” He presented in front of forty fidgety young peers, reciting information with little hesitation.

As Vikram spoke, Prakash Bhai praised the greater New Haven community’s response to the temple. He could only recall a single moment of strife in local relations. At an early zoning meeting, one community member called the temple a mosque, conflating Hinduism with Islam, a mistake that indicated ignorance at best and general xenophobia at worst. An awkward silence ensued, broken only when a temple representative corrected the misnomer.

“It’s the way it is,” he said, shrugging, when I asked him if he found the mistake offensive. It is likely not the first time it has happened, but locals are learning.

Shree Nathji Haveli continues to host annual com 8

Parents and children gather to watch a puja, a Hindu prayer ritual. Photo by Elinor Hills.

munity meetings where representatives from the New Haven Police Department and the New Haven city government meet temple practitioners and explore the space. Prakash Bhai considers these meetings moments of genuine cultural exchange.

Yet other community members, like Yash Agarwal, a New Haven resident and temple volunteer, do not share this optimism. He said, frowning, that Americans don’t understand Hinduism: “I can understand that they don’t want another religion to take over, but Hinduism isn’t about overtaking; it’s about learning about the good in all.”

Part of Paathshala lessons attempt to prime the children for challenging situations in Hindu life. Temple volunteers ask tough questions about how one should respond to a bully, or how, given today’s climate of risTHE NEW JOUR NAL

...STATUES AND PRAYER SPACES STILL CLASH WITH THE RUSTY TABLES AND CHAIRS PILED AGAINST THE WALLS, REMNANTS OF THE BANQUET HALL

ing Islamophobia, to explain the difference between Hinduism and Islam and the importance of learning about both religions. The question isn’t interested in the theological distinctions between the two faiths, but rather how one should explain those distinctions to someone else.

“The kids are the ones that love coming,” said Prakash Bhai as he observed the scene. “They finish their chores just so they can come earlier.” Although Prakash Bhai seems to have a rosy picture of Hindu life in New Haven, his conviction in the weekly Paathshala lesson holds true. The kids are engaged. They race to ask questions, interrupting each other.

— But Shree Nathji Haveli is not just a children’s school. It also offers prayer sessions for adults and activities for the elderly, becoming a place for com-

APRIL 2016

munity socialization at the end of the week. Yet Shree Nathji Haveli has failed to attract local adolescent Hindus: only two teenagers showed up to class, too few to continue funding the program. This frustrates Prakash Bhai. “Something has to be done,” he said, although he wasn’t quite sure what.

This is a problem of the temple’s age. It is only six years old, meaning current teenagers have not grown up with the Shree Nathji Haveli community. Prakash Bhai is confident that the children enrolled in the current Paathshala class will continue to attend as teenagers.

After Vikram ended his presentation, Prakash Bhai took the stage. He leaned into the microphone and announced that a temple-wide Easter egg hunt would be starting—now.

Immediately, the old banquet hall erupted in chaotic screams and laughter as the children raced around the room, running into each other and their parents’ legs.

Prakash Bhai smiled at my obvious confusion. Easter?

“We’re part of America now,” he said. “This is our culture, too.”

Even Vikram dropped his professional demeanor.

He raced around the room, snatched an egg from below a table, and placed it at the feet of a statue of Shree Nathji.

— Rohan Naik is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College. He is a copy editor of The New Journal.

9

SNAPSHOT

VANISHING WINCHESTER An urban explorer documents the former gun factory before it transforms Isabelle Taft Bryan Buckley, a lanky 23-year-old wedding photographer and welder from New Bedford, Massachusetts, pulls into the parking lot of the Winchester Lofts in his red Volkswagen. He is not interested in the new loft apartments but in the decaying walls and boarded-up windows immediately adjacent to them. He wears a hoodie, jeans, and a baseball cap. His face is smooth and boyish. He takes out his phone and pulls up a satellite image of the block on which we’re parked, which shows the sections of collapsed roof and incongruous green foliage that first drew him to this spot. In this building, during World War II, New Haveners built the Nazi-defeating successors to the Winchester Model 1873—“the gun that won the West.”

Buckley is an urban explorer, or “urbexer”—a member of an informal, global community of people who spend weekends and evenings visiting structures that are closed to the public. Some urbexers break into subway tunnels or onto rooftops, but Buckley falls into a more history-minded camp. He prefers abandoned landmarks like factories and mental asylums. He posts his photographs to his website, Instagram account, and Facebook page under the shared title Vanishing New England, and labels the photographs with hashtags like “#dark #decay #grime #newengland” so fellow urbexers can find them. He even deploys a bot to “Like” photos with urbex-related hashtags and encourage their post-

THIS IS THE KIND OF VORACITY—COLLECTING RUINED PLACES LIKE BADGES—THAT SOME FIND A TROUBLING ASPECT OF URBAN EXPLORATION. ers to follow his own account. In this niche post-industrial economy, Buckley is a shrewd businessman.

He is only one of many who have visited the Winchester factory over the past decade and taken photographs of molding floors, busted urinals, an empty 10

elevator shaft, and light shining hopefully through crumbling walls. In online spaces named Nostalgic Memoir, Abandonedforgotten, and Abandoned Connecticut a visual catalog of the factory’s past decade has steadily accumulated. UrbEx-style photographs of the factory have even graced the pages of this magazine, as a photo collage in 2012.

From the photographs, you get the sense that when the factory doors closed in the early 1980s, history stopped. Time and the elements moved on by themselves, eroded paint and rusted metal with only the occasional graffiti artist for an audience. But in reality, Winchester continued to evolve. In 2012, student financial services firm Higher One spent $46 million to open new offices in part of the building. In 2014, real estate company Forest City began leasing 158 apartment units—the Winchester Lofts—with a marketing strategy heavy on history. The website claims that “at the intersection of past and present, genuine craft is evident in every element,” and promises a “feeling of authenticity … when you step into your apartment.”

Soon, those same developers will begin construction on another two hundred apartment units, with an outdoor pool and a bocce court. When that happens, the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory’s brief but prolific second life as a New Haven urban exploration destination will come to a final close. Buckley is here to document this liminal space, the fast-closing period of abandonment between the assembly lines, the jobs and the guns of the twentieth century, and the concrete-floor master bedrooms, the doggie bathtubs, and the pilates machines of the twenty-first.

— In its general outline, the story of the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory is distinctly American: humble beginnings, rapid expansion fueled by violence and machines, a labor force of immigrants, a triumphant peak at World War II, a decades-long afterglow, and then the steady decline of an economy that made many things, but mostly our image of ourselves.

The factory was first built in 1870, two decades after its founder, Oliver Fisher Winchester, arrived in New Haven and entered the manufacturing business. The company established itself in 1866 with a repeating rifle that outpaced the competition and won fans the THE NEW JOUR NAL

# s b d # in

#firearms #urbanexploration #urbex #M sachusetts #newengland #dark #decay bexusa #urbandecay #deathofindustry # dustry #total_abandoned #mold #collaps #architecture #woodwork #doors #vanis ngnewengland #loves_decay #connetic Debris covers the floor of a room in the former gun factory.

Buckley posted this picture online with a slew of urbex hashtags.

world over. In 1908, the Hartford Courant reported that President Theodore Roosevelt ordered four different types of rifles for a hunting trip in Africa. During World War I, European demand for rifles fed demand for labor at the area’s gun factories, including Winchester; in 1915, twelve thousand machinist positions had to be filled to churn out one hundred million dollars’ worth of guns. “Everything booming in the Elm City,” said the headlines.

Winchester’s workforce reached 21,000 people during World War II. Desperate to produce more guns, managers overrode the objections of white employees to hire African Americans, largely migrants from the South. Black newspapers from Atlanta to Chicago covered the development; for them, working in the factory was a victory not only for racial but also for economic justice. But the victory was short lived. The sum of all factory wages in the city peaked in 1954, and declined precipitously after that.

For Winchester, part of the problem was peace. After Korea and Vietnam, by the late nineteen-seventies, the factory was losing millions of dollars every year.

Its parent company, the Olin Corporation, demanded major productivity increases from workers, who went on strike in 1979. Olin responded by cutting jobs and production, shutting down large portions of the factory APRIL 2016

and sectioning them off as industrial ruins.

Winchester was not an anomaly. From the nineteen-fifties on, factories across the country laid off workers and shut down the machines as management shifted production to the South or out of the states. By 1997, ninety percent of the factory jobs that had existed in New Haven in 1954 had disappeared, according to Yale political scientist Douglas Rae in his book City: Urbanism and Its End. The ultimate end came in 2006, when the last two hundred workers were laid off and gun production ceased forever. The small swath of the Newhallville factory then still in operation closed, and the machines were auctioned off. On March 31, 2006, New Haven made Winchester rifles. On April 1, 2006, it didn’t.

— Buckley pulls out his camera and tripod from the VW trunk. A woman and her dog walk into the lofts.

No one seems to notice as we march across the parking lot towards the boarded-up windows. The ground is sandy and littered with cans of Budweiser, glass Starbucks Frappuccino bottles, and glossy Fritos bags.

We turn right at the corner of the building and find a red door, a few feet off the ground, with a wood pallet leaned against it serving as a ladder. We climb up and into the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory.

11

Screenshots of Buckley’s Winchester photographs on the Vanishing New England Facebook page.

“Easy,” Buckley says.

The size of the space is jarring; somehow from outside the abandonment seems more contained. There is a faint trickling sound—the recent snow melting into the puddles on the floor. The water laps against moss and a grey, flattened shoe. A few pairs of newer, cleaner shoes are arranged in tidy rows away from the water, perhaps by someone who has no other place to put them.

Both nature and shelter seekers are reclaiming the space. But aside from the flora and refuse, Winchester is mostly vacant, one of the emptier abandoned buildings Buckley has seen. He’s been in offices where typewriters still sit on the desks, factories whose break rooms still look just as they did on the last day of operation. What is left behind here is valueless: descriptions of gun parts taped onto the walls as guides for employees, or, in a bathroom piled with crumbling porcelain, a paper towel dispenser from which brown paper still extends.

Buckley approaches the urban exploration process systematically, aiming to cover every room of every site he visits. He’s returned to his favorite spots in New Bedford several times over, driven partly, it seems, by a desire to claim them.

“You want to find places no one has found,” he said.

“It’s very similar to, like, graffiti in a way. I don’t like graffiti artists because they destroy these places. But they like to tag their name, show that they’ve been there, and we like to take photos and post them online 12

to show that we’ve been there.”

This is the kind of voracity—collecting ruined places like badges—that some find a troubling aspect of urban exploration. The destruction of livelihoods enabled this weekend excursion, and there was little trace left of the people who toiled here for years as we happily snapped pictures.

In an essay in Guernica in 2011, Wayne State University English professor John Patrick Leary criticizes ruin photography in “the Mecca of urban ruins:” Detroit.

“As a purely aesthetic object, even with the best intentions, ruin photography cannot help but exploit a city’s misery; but as political documents on their own, they have little new to tell us,” he writes.

Buckley’s photographs are silent on the subject of the poverty that set into Newhallville as manufacturing jobs fled the city. On the other hand, Buckley’s photography may be returning these spaces to the People, however niche his actual audience may be. Boarded up, the buildings are accessible only to their owners and developers surveying potential reuse projects. But anyone can visit Vanishing New England to see dozens of photographs of abandoned structures, ranging from a train’s dining car to the Remington razor factory in Bridgeport, to Winchester in New Haven. He views himself as a preservationist of sorts, documenting industrial America before it disappears.

“If I have kids and they grow up, they’re not gonna see these places,” he says. “They’re gonna be gone.

America’s never gonna see this again.”

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Besides, Buckley is not the typical white-collar, “creative type” urbexer, the kind whose love affairs with sites of industrial toil can seem condescending at best and vaguely necrophiliac at worst. He spends his weeks working in a factory as a welder, making boat stands. His father is a machinist. His aunts worked in New Bedford’s textile mills, several of which have now, like much of Winchester, been turned into lofts.

(In a more thoroughly Vanished New England, his great-great-grandfather hunted whale on the last whaling ship out of New Bedford.)

Almost every weekend, he drives to new sites, often with his girlfriend, Tessa. They discover some online, reported by other urbexers, but Buckley is proud that he’s located about a dozen that, as far as he can tell, no one else has documented online. Factories are among the easier places to find: using Google Earth, he chooses a town, finds a river, zooms in, and follows the water until he sees the signs of ruins.

— Forest City real estate promotes the Winchester Lofts with allusions to what they used to be. The marketing strategy dovetails with one of the funding sources for the project: nearly twenty million dollars in federal and state tax credits, granted to developers for preserving historic structures.

Israel Marquez is a leasing consultant at Winchester, and part of his job is to give prospective renters tours of the facilities. Marquez looks to be in his late twenties, wears a purple sweater and neat black slacks, and ties his shoulder-length hair in a ponytail.

He offers me a cup of coffee made with a Keurig in the corner of the leasing office. Then he points out the electronic concierge that displays images telling residents if they have mail or need to pay their rent.

He takes me to the game room with a pool table, the lounge with a television, and the very clean fitness room, all of which are equipped with complimentary WiFi. There is a “pet spa” to avoid the indignity of bathing your dog in a shower.

The apartment units themselves look how lofts usually look: artfully sterile, intentionally cool. Exposed pipes, preserved from the factory, cross over our heads.

“The theme of Winchester,” as Marquez calls it, also appears in art featured in the common spaces. Framed, enlarged copies of the rifle patents greet us as we get off the elevator. Mid-century advertisements for Winchester guns line the hall from the leasing office to the common spaces. And large, color photographs of the factory in its rusting, pre-lofts state look, in this context, like the large animal heads Teddy Roosevelt must have taken home as trophies won with Winchester rifles in 1908.

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The photographs are strikingly similar to those Buckley uploads to Instagram and his website. The difference is that what Buckley does is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, and it’s against the rules—he breaks countless trespassing laws while doing it. Jonathan Gertman, development manager of Forest City, told me over the phone that he had never heard of anyone visiting the fenced-off section of the building just for fun. The property, like the rest of America’s thirty thousand Forest City apartment complexes, he says, has plenty of parking lot lighting and good security. The old part of Winchester is simply best left alone.

The developers, however, commissioned photographer Ramsey Bakhoum to go into the pre-reconstruction buildings to create works for loft residents to enjoy.

Bakhoum’s artist statement, next to a black-and-white shot titled “Rebirth,” says the “aged factory, rich with history, texture, architectural craft and stories untold created a unique opportunity to find and reveal beauty amidst its forgotten layers and chambers.” The photographs turn all the spectators—all the loft residents— into armchair urban explorers. The ruin pictures become artifacts that make it easier to ignore the actual ruins a few feet away.

In the case of the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory, the date of total disappearance (or, to use Forest City’s terminology, of rebirth) is uncertain. Gertman said the company won’t move forward with plans to redevelop the last forty percent of the factory until it’s certain there’s enough demand for housing in the city.

So Buckley’s contribution to the long digital catalogue of the abandoned Winchester Repeating Arms Factory probably won’t be the last.

As we climb up the stairs and get closer to the roof, the sun gets brighter. Buckley admires the elevator shaft and the cables stretching into the darkness. He shoots a photograph into the shaft, which later he will upload to Facebook with the caption “Going down… way, way down.”

On one of the higher floors, there’s a part of the building with no roof, like a porch. Standing on it, we can look out and see the smooth wall of renovated section of the building, just feet away. This afternoon, Buckley will drive back to New Bedford and pass who knows how many abandoned buildings, all different, all decaying or redeveloping, but vanishing all the same.

Americans may never again see working factories like Winchester, and before long may see the last of decaying factories like Winchester. What we will see instead are lofts.

— Isabelle Taft is a junior in Silliman College.

She is an editor-in-chief of The New Journal.

13

SNAPSHOT

LET’S TALK ABOUT SPEECH A flashy “free speech debate” takes the stage Eleanor Womack

Moderator John Donvan addresses Wendy Kaminer and John McWhorter, both debating in the affirmative; Shaun Harper and Jason Stanley conference. Photo by Samuel Lahoz.

The empty stage of the Yale Repertory Theatre looked like the set of a talk show. A black-and-white photograph of the New York City skyline hung in three panels in the center, and two empty frosted-glass tables stood on either side of the stage, each flanked by a black podium. Lights on the walls shifted sunset-like from orange to pink. On March 1, Yale students, professors, New Haven locals, and even high school debate teams shuffled into the Rep clutching grey pamphlets that declared: “Free Speech is Threatened on Campus.”

This was a public debate hosted by the nonprofit Intelligence Squared, but its resolution might have been lifted from any of the endless finger-wagging think pieces that appeared in response to anti-racism demonstrations last semester at the University of Missouri, Yale, and other colleges. And although the 14

debate had been scheduled long before last November, higher-ups at Intelligence Squared chose the topic specifically because of its relevance to Yale, according to Dana Wolf, the executive producer of Intelligence Squared U.S. In the theatre, Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis sat alone in the third row. Last November, when his wife, associate master and professor of psychology Erika Christakis, quoted him in an email criticizing over-sensitivity to cultural appropriation, students confronted Master Christakis in the Silliman courtyard. Christakis defended himself, and the email his wife sent, by saying, “I apologize for causing pain, but I am not sorry for the statement … I stand behind free speech. I defend the right for people to speak their minds.” The abstract universality Christakis invoked then would return in THE NEW JOUR NAL

the debate, partly by design: moderator John Donvan insisted that the arguments presented did not refer specifically to Yale, but to college campuses all over the country.

Murmurs rose from the crowd as the audience waited for the debate to begin. A student in a sweater vest walked up to Christakis, smiled, and bent down to talk. They chatted amicably.

— The four debaters took their seats on stage. On the affirmative side were Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and a writer for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia. Arguing for the negative side were Shaun Harper, the executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education, and Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley.

But before anyone gave opening remarks, Donvan instructed the audience to vote using the remotes on the arms of each seat. The outcome of the debate, he explained, would be determined not by which side had the highest percentage of the vote, but by the difference between votes collected at the beginning and end of the debate. When asked if free speech is threatened on campus, forty-nine percent of the audience said yes, twenty-seven percent said no, and twenty-four percent were undecided.

Round one began with each debater giving a six-minute opening speech. The speeches ran the gamut of traditional argument: Kaminer argued that the tendency to label offensive speech as “micro-aggressions” or “forms of discrimination” punishes and suppresses such speech as if it were capable of physical violence.

And although McWhorter emphasized that he opposed unlimited free speech, citing slavery and genocide as topics too abhorrent to be worthy of any debate, he criticized students for shouting down less obviously offensive things instead of engaging in discussion. “What is the line between cultural appropriation and cultural mixture?” he asked. “That’s a tough one. It’s subtle. It’s worth debate. It’s not a matter of just shouting people down if a certain subject comes up or if a certain action is performed.”

On the right side of the stage, Stanley railed against the media’s tendency to frame student protest as a threat to freedom of speech, rather than as students engaged in its exercise. Harper added that students of color on predominantly white campuses are often silent in response to the racism they experience at the hands of their professors or peers. Now that these voices are finally being heard, he said, they should be celebrated, rather than criticized.

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In round two, the debaters engaged in crossfire: Kaminer insisted that Stanley and Harper mischaracterized her argument as anti-protest. The problem, she said, was not that students were protesting, but rather that the protesters were demanding more robust speech codes—official campus policies that limit and restrict what one can say—which she views as demonstrative of a dangerous new turn toward “speech policing.”

But Harper, who, along with McWhorter, was one of the two black debaters, insisted in a booming voice that students of color don’t want speech codes. “They want the curriculum to reflect their humanity. They want the consciousness of their professors and their peers to be raised so that people don’t do this to future generations of students of color on their campuses. That’s what they want. They don’t say a thing to me about speech codes.”

Yale’s history seems to confirm Harper’s claim: while students have been debating the merits of “free speech” for centuries—an 1887 issue of the Yale Daily News announced a Phi Beta Kappa debate on the topic: “Absolutely free speech is not in the best interests of society”—the need for an explicit free speech

BY DESIGN, DEBATE IS NOT ACTION, AND NO ONE EXPECTED THIS ONE TO SETTLE THE CENTURIES-OLD “FREE SPEECH” QUESTION IN AN HOUR AND A HALF

protocol did not arise until the late twentieth century.

Even then, it was the administration, not students, who brought the policy to the table.

That policy, the 1974 Woodward Report, was over a decade in the making. In 1963, after the widely publicized bombing of a Birmingham church, University Provost Kingman Brewster requested that the Yale Political Union withdraw its invitation of Alabama governor George Wallace, an ardent segregationist.

Brewster’s decision, which he maintained was in the interest of maintain positive town-gown relations, was highly criticized by both students and other University officials.

In 1974, Stanford physicist and infamous eugenicist William Shockley was invited to speak at the Yale 15

Political Union. After much internal agitation, the Union withdrew its invitation. But several other organizations attempted to invite Shockley, inducing Brewster to denounce such invitations as inconsiderate and irresponsible, criticizing “the use of free speech as a game.” Shockley did end up coming to campus, invited

by Yale’s branch of the Young Americans for Freedom, but protesters, who made up almost a third of the audience, shouted insults and obscenities at Shockley. After an hour and fifteen minutes, University Secretary Sam Chauncey closed the meeting. For the first time in the University’s modern history, a guest was unable to speak because of organized disruption.

While the editorial board of the Yale Daily News spoke out in support of the protesters, Brewster’s response was far more critical. “It makes me sick that even a small minority of Yale students would choose storm trooper tactics in preference to freedom of speech,” he said.

To ensure such an event would never happen again, Brewster, then president of the University, created a committee to establish a formal policy by which Yale could deal with issues of freedom of speech. In December of 1974, the committee released the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale,” known

THE PROBLEM WAS NOT THAT STUDENTS WERE PROTESTING, BUT THAT THE PROTESTESTERS WERE DEMANDING MORE ROBUST SPEECH CODES—OFFICIAL CAMPUS POLICIES THAT LIMIT AND RESTRICT WHAT ONE CAN SAY—WHICH SHE VIEWS AS DEMONSTRATIVE OF A DANGEROUS NEW TURN TOWARD “SPEECH POLICING.” as the Woodward Report after the committee’s head, historian C. Vann Woodward. According to the report, “the paramount obligation of the University is to protect their right to free expression,” even when such free 16

expression comes at the expense of “civility and mutual respect.” The Woodward Report is still hailed as a shining example of the University’s exercise of its values; President Peter Salovey quoted it heavily during his 2014 address to the freshman class.

But while the Woodward Report was explicit in its commitment to free discourse, it dealt primarily with student protest over speakers invited to Yale. Today’s conversations around free speech, however, focus on individual interactions among students. During the Intelligence Squared debate, Kaminer cited cases where students at Amherst College and the University of South Carolina were investigated for distributing posters which other students found offensive. That these students were investigated, she said, is demonstrative of a recent shift in campus climate that threatens free speech. Yet the kind of cases Kaminer outlined are not new either. And at Yale, the administration’s stance is far more nebulous than the clear-cut commitments of the Woodward Report might suggest.

At Yale’s 1986 Gay and Lesbian Awareness Day, Wayne Dick, a Yale student, distributed flyers advocating “Bestiality Awareness Day.” Yale’s Executive Committee sentenced Dick to two years of probation, calling the fliers harassment of the queer community.

But when Dick appealed his sentence on the grounds that the administration had threatened his freedom of expression, Yale retracted its probation and eventually expunged the incident from Dick’s record.

Twenty-two years later, the University inflicted no punishment on the members of Yale’s Zeta Psi fraternity when its pledges held signs outside the Women’s Center that read, “We Love Yale Sluts.” But in 2010, when fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon sung a song that “made light of rape,” the University sanctioned the frat on the grounds that the brothers had “threatened and intimidated others.” Even then, Yale was not exempt from the criticism that it unduly restricted speech: FIRE urged then-President Richard Levin to overturn the punishment.

Now, as free speech advocates line up against Yale students protesting aspects of campus culture—including the alleged frat party that was for “white girls only”— the possibility of establishing bright lines recedes even further. Should blatantly discriminatory speech be allowed in the interest of protecting all speech?

At the Intelligence Squared debate, affirmative speaker McWhorter said no: “If there is a culture that would allow someone to say that only white women are allowed at a fraternity party, well, that should be shouted to the heavens most certainly.”

Where, then, does McWhorter draw the line? I asked him to clarify over email, after the debate: “That frat THE NEW JOUR NAL

Shaun Harper, on the negative, gestures while debate partner Jason Stanley looks on. Photo by Samuel Lahoz.

party episode should be protested. The frat brother deserves to be called a racist. However, discussion and debate over obviously less egregious things is fine, but should not entail charges that people are ‘racist’ from the get go, or even a general rolling implication that ‘racism’ must be at the bottom of the matter. That is, these discussions should not essentially be show trials.”

McWhorter presented a nuance mostly absent from the debate itself. While it’s easy to decry a culture that insists not only on protesting controversial speakers, but also on silencing them completely, it’s much more difficult to extend that logic to interactions between students, or between students and professors, and claim that speaking out against racism—as students did after the SAE “white girls only” incident—represents a threat to free speech.

In the end, the vote was sixty-six percent in the affirmative (“Free speech is threatened on campus”), and twenty-five percent in the negative, with nine percent undecided. The affirmative picked up seventeen percent of the vote, and was pronounced the winner.

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But as the audience filed out of the Rep, it was difficult to be satisfied with the discourse. In the interest of expanding the scope to “campus” writ large, the details of specific issues at different universities across the country were elided into blunt talking points, and whatever emotions or nuance they might have contained disappeared entirely. But this was perhaps to be expected: By design, debate is not action, and no one expected this one to settle the centuries-old “free speech” question in an hour and a half. Yet the event purported to offer, if not answers, at least clarity. But on the issues raised in the Silliman courtyard, on Cross Campus, at the March of Resilience, and in private spaces all over the University last semester, it didn’t.

— Eleanor Womack is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

17

PROFILE

THE MAGIC FOOT OF HONDO COLWICK A prosthetics craftsman makes what he knows Maya Averbuch The first thing Hondo Colwick remembers about his surgery is the line of metal utensils on a sterile blue sheet. From birth, he had a fatty flap of¬ skin where there should have been a foot. After he turned 3, surgeons sliced off two toes that protruded from the flap’s side. The toes had kept Hondo from easily placing his leg into the below-the-knee prosthesis he’d worn since he was ten months old. They also marked what could have been, if his mother had not used a defective contraceptive called the Dalkon Shield. It stole from the baby it was meant to prevent.

Thirty-seven years after the surgery, Hondo runs his hands over the plaster mold of another man’s stump.

He is an artificial limb maker at the New England Orthotic and Prosthetic Systems (NEOPS) fabrication center in Branford, Connecticut. Today’s project, a snow-white thigh, sticks out from the edge of the table like a precarious Popsicle. A vise grip holds it parallel to the floor, and a metal rod runs from plaster groin to plaster knee—right where the bone would be.

The plaster molds that populate the center are standins for absentee clients. The UPS truck delivers casts from doctors’ offices around New England every morning. Just as dentists stick putty on teenagers’ teeth, physicians wrap plaster gauze around patients’ shortened limbs. When the hardened forms arrive at the fabrication center, the prosthetic technicians line them up.

Hondo’s coworkers fill the casts, and voilà: in fifteen minutes, there’s a statuesque copy of the patient’s leg.

Ripped casts, mottled plastic, and yesterday’s lunch fill blue Rubbermaid Brute trash containers at NEOPS. Dozens of plaster half-limbs are shoved under the table beside the industrial oven. Hondo uses them to make cup-shaped sockets to fit around each amputee’s stump. The sockets attach to metal pylons, which connect to a carbon-fiber skeleton inside a plastic foot.

They lean against the fabrication center’s worktables, like strange flowers blooming on hollow stems. Five plastic toes and five plastic toenails make the foot at the end almost pretty, while the black carbon fiber wedge hidden inside makes it functional. This doll-like end absorbs the shock, the thump, of foot striking ground. It 18

gives the amputee a natural spring in his step.

Hondo is a ruddy-faced man with a sense of humor and a collection of T-shirts in sometimes-poor taste; one from Bass Pro Shops reads: “I Like ’Em With Long Legs and A Big Rack!” alongside a deer silhouette.

But when he is at work, nothing can disturb him; he answers questions with a few cheery but terse replies, sometimes little more than, “Yup.” Like the surgeons looking for his small toes, he inspects the mold to find the hills that stick out and the valleys that go too deep.

He looks for the smooth dip right under the patella, the small protrusion of the tibia, and the stretch of muscle that bears pressure on the back of the calf. He understands, from lumbering around on his own prosthesis, that if the surface does not feel smooth under his palm, a dull ache will settle into the patient’s leg by the middle of the day.

Hondo is one of only two men on the ten-person staff with a prosthesis; the other works at the stitching station. The men blare the radio while working, and Hondo launches into a high-pitched rendition of the song. “Take a look at my girlfriend, yeah, yeah,” he sings.

“We’re looking at a big, big lady!” a co-worker later yells as he pulls out an oversized plaster mold. “Where’s my girl?”

“Was she nice?” Hondo asks cheerily.

“Oh, she’s adorable,” the man replies, returning to work.

This banter is part of an environment where men break off chunks of an old man’s artificial hamstring while singing along to Top-Forty hits. Though Hondo’s entirely respectful of the clients, these jokes have the casualness of a bunch of guys in a workplace (the only woman works in the office, away from the floor). On a Monday morning, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” plays like an ironic anthem: “Don’t wanna see no blood, don’t be a macho man / You wanna be tough, better do what you can.”

No other man in the world has a prosthetic like Hondo Colwick’s. For one thing, his socket extends all the way from knee to ankle to accommodate his THE NEW JOUR NAL

extra-long limb. Perhaps more notably, blue fabric with characters from the Mickey Mouse Club House is laminated into the surface of his prosthesis. It’s a full Disney panorama, from cargo shorts to running shoes.

“People make fun of the Mickey leg,” Hondo says with a grin. They also made fun of his previous choices, Nemo and Taz, but he doesn’t give a damn. He tells people his wife helped him pick the decoration. She was a student at Hondo’s former workplace, Newington Children’s Hospital, and they were married at the Disney World wedding pavilion several years later. He tells kids, though, that it’s his “Magic Foot.”

— Hondo’s name comes from a six-foot-five basketball superstar who used to play for the Celtics. Hondo’s parents stopped calling him Andrew—his legal name— when he was 2 years old. A sporty nickname seemed more fitting for this wild, rambunctious boy, though Hondo does not exactly resemble the Celtic’s John “Hondo” Havlicek. “He’d literally go from one end of the court to the other,” Hondo says of his Celtics namesake, “and I guess I was a little terror.”

His mother believes the Dalkon Shield, an intra-uterine device that led to thousands of lawsuits in the nineteen-seventies, caused Hondo’s congenital limb defect. But she has no proof, only numbers. After the FDA pulled the product from the shelves, women who filed for damages won nearly $2.5 billion. They spoke in courts about inflammatory pelvic infections, septic abortions, and a few cases of death. One lost foot was not out of the question.

Hondo tells me about his time as a point guard on the basketball court, flank on the soccer field, pitcher and first baseman on the baseball diamond. He wasn’t worried about what would happen if he ran around, and it showed: between the ages of 1 and 13, Hondo broke many prosthetic legs. At age 6, he snapped his ankle in two at his parents’ beach cottage in Old Lyme, Connecticut. His father accidentally glued his foot on backwards, and they had to drive all the way back to the hospital to have the technicians put it back together.

Hondo doesn’t have all that much to say about his leg, because as far as he’s concerned, he’s just a “normal family guy”—the kind who goes home to a small house with a wife and a 3-year-old kid, who tunes in to fox or The Walking Dead, and who goes motor boating in his 22-foot Sea Ray on weekends. He likes the boat for the freedom, and the saltwater, and the feeling of being out on the ocean. But he adds that maneuvering with rudimentary prosthetic technology when he was a child was not easy.

His early prostheses teetered on a foam foot and included an adjustable socket bound by Velcro straps.

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“People thought I was always limited,” he says. But then they’d see him play.

His older siblings treated him gently (not just because he was the youngest), and they stood up for him if any other kids turned mean. But Hondo says they didn’t have much work to do: “I always stood up for myself.

I never got bullied or anything.” Now, his sister works for Hallmark and his brother works for an insurance company—the ultimate disaster response team.

Hondo got into the prosthetics business because, after high school, it seemed pragmatic, and he was always good with his hands. Newington Orthotic & Prosthetic Systems, where he was certified as a technician, functioned alongside the children’s hospital where he had gotten his first prosthetic. He stayed on until the company was bought out by Hanger, Inc. “I have a love of helping people get their lives on track,” he says. “It’s just nice to see people walk again.”

Hondo’s lucky, by some standards: the fact that he’s been footless since birth means that his leg muscles aren’t shrinking. Unlike the bodies of many amputees, his is not in a constant state of flux. When his leg irritates him, he makes a few adjustments instead of making a new socket.

But prostheses’ life spans are limited. “This is my old foot,” Hondo says, pulling out a glossy black piece of carbon shaped like a tiny children’s slide. Though he now does lay-ups only when he’s visiting his nephews in Southington, Connecticut, he strains his prosthesis by working hard each day. “When carbon snaps, it makes a pop—a real, loud pop,” he says, looking at the old Freedom Innovations foot that he stores at the workshop. “Seven years on it, and it finally broke.”

— Mass-produced feet, mass-produced knees, and mass-produced joints provide mobility to over 1.6 million U.S. amputees. Fewer than two thousand are veterans who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority are elderly individuals who have lost circulation and often end up in the hospital for vascular diseases. People in traumatic accidents are a close second.

More than two hundred American artificial limb manufacturers were at the ready when the first shots of World War I were fired. The mom-and-pop operations that once shipped arms and legs across the country have since closed. Big players like New England Orthotic and Prosthetics Systems—the second-largest O&P company in the country—have taken over the supply chain.

Mac Hanger, a physician who comes to the fabrication center to adjust patients’ molds, is the great-grandson of the Civil War’s first amputee. His great-grandfather started Hanger, Inc., NEOPS’s biggest competitor, 19

Artificial limbs and plaster molds sit on a table at New England Orthotic and Prosthetic Systems. Photo by Maya Averbuch.

after a cannonball tore off his leg at the Battle of Philippi. Surgeons at that time wiped their knives on aprons in preparation for the next man, and chloroform didn’t always dampen the pain. But you could make a sturdy enough leg out of barrel wood, and the young man did just that. He then made his money off of the war’s thirty-five thousand amputees. For an above-theknee prosthesis, the going rate at the time was two hundred dollars.

Brand-name legs became part of American business.

The Selpho Leg, which was originally made with catgut tendons, arrived from London in 1839. The E-ZLeg, or Liberty Leg, became all the rage in the summer of 1918. Woodrow Wilson’s National Defense Act funded the creation of an Artificial Limb Laboratory to account for the four thousand amputees that stumbled out of World War I. White willow wood, which had been dried over years, was once the most popular option (until too many maimed men stayed alive for the trees to keep pace).

After World War II, the veterans who spurred many of the advances of the industry were the same guys who appeared in instructional manuals with their hands on their hips and their pants rolled up, or in army archives with a lit cigarette. In Artificial Parts, Practical Lives, 20

communications professor David Serlin argues that the U.S. media used amputees to glamorize postwar patriotism and combat the public’s concerns about fragile American families.

Prostheses became symbols of masculinity lost and found. The Philadelphia Inquirer raised more than $50,000 for an army private who lost all his comrades and limbs in a Pacific Ocean plane crash in World War II. Other newspapers featured him posing with Miss America in a GM car specially made for amputees.

Academy-Award-winning films like “The Best Years of Our Lives” told the tale of a veteran named Homer with mechanical-hook hands. He married the darling next door by the time the credits rolled.

The attitudes toward people with disabilities have changed rapidly since the nineteen-forties, now that Olympic athletes and sexy models have borrowed the mantle of military men. Cheetah-like feet allow runners to sprint forward, and adjustable ankles let highheel wearers out on the town. But America’s image of amputees remains inextricably linked to war. For men like Hondo, the awkwardness of the association is hard to escape.

“Thank you for your service,” a man said when Hondo took his daughter to Dunkin’ Donuts for a THE NEW JOUR NAL

breakfast sandwich in November. He was not the first; an army veteran had recently spotted Hondo’s leg at Walgreens and congratulated its owner for heroism.

Such mistakes happen all the time, and Hondo replies without pause.

“I was born without a foot,” Hondo tells them. He teaches them about the prosthetics businesses, describing his days at a workshop that many never even knew existed. He’s easy-going about it, unwilling to make a fuss. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a real foot.”

— The door of the hulking oven opens and a billow of heat tumbles out. Hondo’s gloved hand grasps the melted ProFlex inside the 400° Fahrenheit cave. As Hondo lifts the metal ring around the sheet, the center of the plastic gives in to gravity. It resembles, for a moment, a perfectly transparent bowl suspended in midair.

Muscles cannot push; they can only pull or stop pulling. The muscles that use force to contract are called the “agonists,” whereas the muscles that resist are the “antagonists.” As Hondo stretches the plastic over the plaster mold, he leans forward; the muscles in his back, in his arms, in his legs shift into position. He begins to pull, pull, pull.

When the plastic cools, he covers it with sock-like layers of black carbon mesh and white fiberglass. A vacuum-sucked PVC plastic stretches around the bundle, making it look like cream frosting in a cake-decorating bag. The Kingsley Manufacturing Company’s color options include Caucasian, Dark Caucasian, Light Caucasian, 4A Medium Brown, 7A Dark Brown, Latin, Oriental, and Snow White (which Hondo says they don’t buy). He pours a mixture of paint and epoxy into a cut-off Mountain Dew container at the top of the bag. The finished stumps resemble a cluster of giants’ thumbs on the metal-top table.

But the cosmetic process is far from over. “People don’t want to look at a pylon, you know what I mean?”

Hondo says. He wraps a piece of foam around the leg because he wants to make a shape resembling a lifelike calf. The grinder emits an angry squeal every time it makes contact.

A seam of yellow glue along the back of the foam looks like a bad stocking seam, and the edges near the ankle are frayed like the fabric on the end of an old t-shirt. But Hondo inspects the leg meticulously: if he gets the angles of the foam just right, people might not notice that CPI 26 is printed on the bottom of the plastic foot shell, or that the ankle only bends so far.

When Hondo picks up his 3-year-old, Faith, from daycare at the end of the day and brings her home, bits of this leg will come with him. “I’m just constantly APRIL 2016

washing my hands, and the plaster’s drying my palms up even worse,” he says. Tiny shards of fiberglass turn his hands redder each day. Shreds of carbon slip under the skin. “That stuff’s—ooh—that stuff’s no good either.” He shudders. “That stuff’s so fine that once it gets on you, it itches the crap out of you.”

He’s so busy looking at other people’s legs all day, or doting on his child, that he scarcely pays attention to his own leg. Though he had to order a new foot, he hasn’t bothered to replace the rest of his prosthesis in the past seven years; most people make a change after just three. His wife’s father, a physician in the prosthetics business, will probably fit him for a new leg when the current one breaks.

“It’s like the mechanic driving a crappy car, and the shoe repairman whose kids have holes in their shoes,” he says.

His wife, Sara, grew up understanding artificial body parts. Her uncle lost his leg in a farming-machine accident at age 10 and started a family prosthetics business as a young man. Before she started work at a medical supply company, she learned to make prosthetics at Newington Children’s Hospital. The first practice leg she made was for Hondo, far before she got to know him. First tries are often rough-hewn and chafe the skin, but he gritted his teeth and said, “Oh, it’s great!” when he fit it on.

“What was happening when daddy got this? Do you remember?” Sara asks Faith, as the child plays with a stuffed dog with floppy brown ears. Hondo’s grandmother gifted him the dog on the day of his first foot surgery.

“No,” Faith says, blond curls falling into her face.

She’s got her father’s endless energy and a second foot to propel her. She squirms in her seat and holds Patches in her arms.

“That’s just the way it is,” Sara says.

Hondo watches Faith climb onto the table before she’s escorted to bed. He might one day tell her that, in his surgery room, he slept in a bed next to a Saudi prince’s son. He might laugh when he admits that he got kicked out of the play area for crawling over other kids with his cast. He might mention what it’s like to walk around with the daily assistance of plastic and titanium and carbon. But for now, none of that matters.

Faith just knows that not every kid has a father with a Mickey Mouse leg.

— Maya Averbuch is a senior in Berkeley College.

She is a former editor-in-chief of The New Journal.

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P E R S O N A L E S S AY

ONE LITTLE ROOM, AN EVERYWHERE Remembering what I wanted Hayley Byrnes A year after we lost the house, on a chilly summer day, my mother refused to get out of the car. That is the only sentence written in my journal. Mom refuses to get out of the car. We were in a dirt parking lot one block away from our old house. Neither of us had visited the house since it had been foreclosed upon one year earlier. I was 20. My mother was now living with my grandfather in a town forty miles away. I know now that I didn’t want to stay with her, but what I told myself then, in the car, was that I wanted to visit our next-door neighbors. I had it in my mind that I would not be seeing much of them in the future.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived was a man carrying a baby at the top of my old house’s driveway.

He was the new owner. My neighbor Valerie waved to me from her porch. She had painted every piece of patio furniture canary yellow. She sat on a chair with a sheaf of drawing paper in her lap. There was a line of clothes that billowed in the wind. This wasn’t the first time that I wanted to be a part of her family. This time, though, I felt something dangerous well up inside me.

It wasn’t jealousy. In that moment I didn’t want what Valerie had; I wanted for her not to have it. It frightened me. The feeling came and went like an image of a pop can flashed onto a movie screen, too quickly for me to know where it came from or whether it was real. I knew only that the woman who sat painting on an ugly chair was a woman with whom I did not want to spend the next seven days. My breath rose and fell as I walked up to her. We smiled at one another in a way that was friendly, but not as friendly as I would have expected, coming back to the town after a long time.

— One night the new owners threw a party. I watched it from the window of my room in Valerie’s house. Men in Hawaiian shirts looked at a spiral of smoke curling up in the air from a grill. Women stood in dresses swaying in the wind and children ran barefoot on the grass and the mulch around the catalpa trees. Someone played an old rock album from a boom box on a picnic table that my mother and I had left in the yard. When the sun set, a woman came out of the back door with a 22

white cake with candles for the man I recognized as the father. A thrum of drunken voices sang “Happy Birthday.” I told myself I would remember what I saw. One day I would write about it.

I was staying alone in the room of Valerie’s daughter. Valerie was an artist and years ago had painted a mural of the neighborhood children on the walls of her daughter’s bedroom. The one who was supposed to be me stood turned away from the other children with a dandelion in her hand. She held the flower to her face and watched the seeds flow away in the wind.

The other girls played with one another and with boys in a garden that looked like Eden. As a child, I hated that painting.

IT’S HARD FOR ME TO SAY WHETHER WE WOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE HOUSE IF MY FATHER WERE ALIVE. I’M NOT SURE IF IT’S USEFUL TO PLAY THAT GAME, TO REWIND THE TAPE AND PLAY IT AS IF HE WERE ALIVE.

I was staring at the wall wondering why I had come. I wasn’t thinking about the past. I was thinking about the party. I imagined small acts of terror I could do to that house—breaking a window, spray-painting the walls, slashing tires. But no—I didn’t want to do anything violent. I only wanted to look through the window and see what of ours the family had kept, if anything.

I shut the back door softly behind me and walked THE NEW JOUR NAL

across the gravel to a patch of grass under the dining room window. Heat rose sharply in my cheeks. I felt the same way I did as a child before I stole something. The inside of the house was dark. I waited to feel something piercing in my chest—some prickly violent unfamiliar pain, some feeling that I otherwise did not allow myself to feel, anger or hatred or resentment, that for once I could feel without fear of judgment.

Somewhere in the darkness a baby cried. A window must have been open because the cry wasn’t muffled. Upstairs a light went on and a pair of shadows weaved around one another on the curtain. The noise startled me. There was nothing unique about it, but for some reason it reminded me of a voice I knew. The air smelled of the lilacs that my father had planted for my mother at the foot of the porch years ago.

It’s hard for me to say whether we would have stayed in the house if my father were alive. I’m not sure if it’s useful to play that game, to rewind the tape and play it as if he were alive. My mother would not have quit her job to take care of me. She would not have lost what little savings she had. People we knew would die. Others would get married. A plane would still hit the towers. Not long after that, a war would start.

The housing market would crash. But somehow it wouldn’t matter. Everything would fall into place. We would be fine.

I started back the way I’d come, careful not to cut my bare feet on the gravel, as I often did as a child.

— It got light early in the summer, early enough for me to explore the neighborhood without fear of running into anyone. Before breakfast, I’d made it a rule to run around town. I had never seen our house in the soft pale blue light of morning. I’d had no reason to. I learned from Valerie that the father had a job at a hospital. He left before sunrise. One day when I was sure no one was home I went through the yard to jump into the pool. But the new owners had covered it with a tarp, an old broken tarp with a hole in the middle. I was walking to the edge when I saw on the concrete a small pool of blood around a dead robin. I used a catalpa leaf to carry the bird into the forest behind the field in my old yard. When I was a child, my mother and I played games in the forest, stumbling out the other side pretending to be explorers or time travelers who’d APRIL 2016

illustration by Alejandro Nodarse 23

I THOUGHT SUDDENLY OF MY FATHER, WHOM I REMEMBERED DIMLY BUT DIDN’T KNOW. MY MEMORIES OF HIM COME AND GO LIKE LONG BRIGHT SQUARES OF LIGHT THAT PASS OVER A DARK WALL. WHAT I FELT, I THINK, WAS LOVE. happened on a new place. My elementary school was on the other side of the forest and I pretended Mom was my sister and the other kids and parents were our long lost family. I was thinking about the game as I dug a hole in the damp soil. My mother was happy then.

— During the time when my mother and I were moving out of our house, I bought a journal in which I wrote down everything I wanted to remember. I didn’t write about my mother or myself or anyone else. Most of my entries were inventories of the objects that filled every room in our house. They reminded me of the long rambling genealogies of the Bible. Living room: red velvet couch, paisley chair, green Victorian loveseat with mahogany cherubs, wooden jewelry box I painted red and blue, framed wolf painting (Dad’s?). I was happy to think that I was producing something that only I would want to read. Something that my mother would care very little about. The fact that I had finally found a way to remember without inserting my perilous, naked, vulnerable self into the matter was a relief. Even if my mother found my journal, I was safe.

But after we moved I kept using it, mostly to record the fights I had with my mother. They were not diary entries, not really. They were transcriptions. My hand-

24

writing was messy. I wrote most of the entries as fast as I could in the minutes after I had stormed into my room.

But the words that I wrote had the same icy coolness of my lists. I wrote our arguments like lines of dialogue.

I didn’t take out my journal until the last day, when the new owners had a yard sale. I recognized many of the objects as things we had left behind. The red velvet couch was on the curb with the other objects they were giving away. The woman told me to take anything I’d like. I found in the garage a mirror that had been there ever since I was a child. My grandmother on my father’s side had brought it from a vacation in France not long before she died. It was too big for any room in the house. I had forgotten it.

I thought suddenly of my father, whom I remembered dimly but didn’t know. My memories of him come and go like long bright squares of light that pass over a dark wall. What I felt, I think, was love.

I had no words to prime the feeling. I hadn’t kept a journal before he died, but whatever the feeling was, it remained. It came to me that my only memories of him were in the house, and I wondered if that meant anything—if one day I would wake up in a different place and find that I had forgotten to remember him because nothing and no one around me was reminding me to do so. That the tape I ran in my head from time to time of him throwing me in the air before bed or holding a pink afghan tightly around his shoulders on a hot afternoon, hours before an ambulance drove to the top of our driveway—that one day this tape would run out, and I would lose whatever it was that made me keep rewinding it. I wanted to keep missing him and I feared the day this would stop being so.

There was a crack in the middle of the mirror. I was staring at my figure, in shadow with the sun behind me. I reached to feel the cold glass. I wondered what about this day I would forget later on. As I heard my mother’s car pull into Valerie’s driveway, I touched my collarbone, and even in the darkness, I wished suddenly there were more of me.

— Hayley Byrnes is a senior in Silliman College.

She is a former senior editor of The New Journal.

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â&#x20AC;&#x2030;26

A student activist finds her place in the history of Black organizing at Yale

by Eshe Sherley

THE NEW JOUR NAL

Below: The BSAY Class of 1976 outside the House, including Larry Irvin (bottom left) and Bisa Williams (middle right).

Above: Students play ping pong downstairs in what would later be renovated and renamed the Lighten Room.

Micah Jones and I are standing by a foldout table at Afro-American Cultural Center, better known as the House. She is the president of the Black Student Alliance at Yale, and I am her vice president and righthand woman. We’re selling T-shirts to alumni at the House’s forty-fifth anniversary event.

A woman, impeccably dressed, approaches us. She introduces herself as Bisa Williams. In 1975, six years after the House’s founding, Williams became the first Black woman president of BSAY since its founding in 1967. After Yale, she served as the Ambassador to Niger. As she talks to us, she looks over our last-minute display. She has an air of officiousness, but there is a warmth about her.

Photos of the Afro-American Cultural Center courtesy of Chad Hillard.

Archive Photos from Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale Records (RU 957). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

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She buys a shirt, but before she leaves, she says, “If I had to give you any advice, it would be to make sure you graduate on time.” She explains that before she became president, not a single one of her predecessors had graduated within four years. “I was determined for that not to be me. I was getting out in four years,” she tells us. “People will try to make you do everything, but you can’t let them.”

Micah and I look at each other. Too late.

— For the past two years, I have interacted with the House not only as a leader and a member, but also as a historian. These roles can’t be separated—black protest and black scholarship have long gone hand in hand.

Black activism at Yale gained global attention this past semester through the March of Resilience, when students of color reminded the campus of the ways in which Yale continues to fail them. And while the activism led to important advances, it did not erase past conflicts. In my research on the House, I’ve encountered repetitive cycles of conflict—not only between the Black student body and Yale, but also within its own community.

Every BSAY board faces challenges, but the 2014– 2015 board walked into an exceptionally difficult year.

For four years, the Black community had been fractured under the leadership of Dean Rodney Cohen, the House’s top administrator at the time. Within 27

months of his appointment in 2010, House staff, headed by Allison Robinson and Ivy Onyeador, wrote a letter to the Dean’s office about Cohen’s pattern of regularly missing staff meetings, not coming to student events, and failing to approve the undergraduate staff’s hours so that they could be paid. (Cohen could not be reached for comment for this story.)

In the words of this staff in 2010, “Dean Cohen’s performance as Director of the House has been at best, lackluster, and at worst, appalling. He has presented a pattern of inconsistency, unreliability and lack of leadership that we haven’t experienced before, driving us to seek advice and guidance elsewhere.”

When I arrived as a freshman in 2012, I saw these problems persist. I had entered into the midst of a debate that began with that letter, which in turn introduced me to alumni like Bisa Williams, who came back to the House in the fall of 2014. Their dismay at the disorganized state of the House community reopened a familiar wound. We had watched the Black student leaders before us struggle over what to do about Cohen’s tenure, and as a result, Micah and I made ousting Cohen a priority.

The previous board produced a petition asking for Cohen to be “retrained” in the spring of 2014, but there was no response from Yale College adminis-

trators Dean Mary Miller, Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry, or Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews. If administrators, two Black and one white, would not respond to communication from Black students, then it was time to stop asking and start demanding. The Yale we were contending with was no longer the gentleman’s club of the House’s founding years, but an unresponsive bureaucracy.

— Since its founding in 1969, Black activism has kept the House alive. Through the leadership of Armstead Robinson ’68, Don Ogilvie ’68, and Glen DeChabert ’70 (collectively known as “the Founders”), the House, then called Afro America Inc., was established at 1195 Chapel Street. By 1970, the House moved to 211 Park St., the former Chi Psi fraternity house, and was renovated in 1971.

The BSAY board at the time had asked for a Black Cultural Center as a refuge from the pervasive whiteness of Yale life. Early in the 1969 spring term, BSAY sent President Kingman Brewster a letter demanding the founding of a BCC by September of the same year.

The letter also reflected the many needs that Black students hoped the BCC would fulfill, including money for a part time coordinator of the center (approved by BSAY and the Afro American Study Group), a Black

Portraits of noted African American Studies Professors Sylvia Ardyn Boone and John Blassingame in the Founder’s Room of the Afam House.

70.

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Student p rotest the trial again Black Pan st the thers duri ng Ma y D ay in 19

freshman counseling program, and help from the administration to obtain outside funding for social action.

In September of 1969, Black students got their BCC. Soon, they would just call it “the House.” While winning Afro America Inc. and the African American Studies Department in 1969 were hard-fought victories, they inaugurated a battle over resources—necessary to allow the space to thrive—that would continue for decades.

The University’s actions have historically starved the house of financial and human resources. Every year since its founding, the director has had to struggle to make sure the House and its many member groups have enough money to operate successfully.

In the House’s early years in the nineteen-seventies, Black students attempted to transfer their Student Activities Fee from their residential colleges to the House, as they felt unwelcome at college parties, like one with a “Klan Party” theme in 1982. When the Student Activities Fee was reconfigured, the House had to start charging membership fees to Black students and even higher fees to students who came for individual events.

Yale has also historically been stingy with resources for the physical structure of the House. In 1989, house Director Melvin Wade had to spend the beginning of the school year making sure that the University removed the last of the asbestos that had been partially dealt with in the summer. Even worse, according to Wade, the University had not brought the building up to code since 1928.

Upon returning to Yale for the thirtieth anniversary of the House in 1999, the Black alumni were mortified by the state of the building that they had worked so hard to maintain. Dean Pamela George described her first impression when she walked into the space as its new director in 2000: “It was terrible. I cried. The rats, the roaches, praying that a roach didn’t come out while we were having an event—I hope I killed the last roach. The buckets, because the roof was leaking all over the place. It was horrible.”

What happened to the roaches, the mice, and the leaking roof? The alumni got fed up. With George on board, they began a capital campaign to renovate the House. By the thirty-fifth anniversary celebration in 2004, the entire basement had been redone, an archive for the House had been established, and there was an endowment for Black student leadership development named the ORD Fund after the founders of the House: Ogilvie, Robinson, and DeChabert.

But starting in 2010, at the beginning of Dean Cohen’s term, the gains reversed. The kitchen, like in

While the activism led to important advances, it did not erase past conflicts [or] repetitive cycles of conflict.

2000, became barely useable. A large rug in the main room covered a wooden floor that needed repair. The library, which used to boast countless books about Black history and culture, was nearly empty. More importantly, the House began to empty of people, as Black students saw the House as a less welcoming place.

To make matters worse, the Yale administration decided to merge the “House directorship” position with an “assistant deanship” in the early nineteen-nineties, emphasizing the job’s connection to the Yale College Dean’s Office. This balancing act is not only taxing for the director, but also for the Black students who have to compete for the director’s time. Community building and direct interaction with Black students dropped on the list of priorities. George was one of the first directors who had to navigate the change. She commented on the risk of a director becoming isolated within the administration, away from the House and its members. “Before you know it,” she said, “something’s fallen apart.”

— While Micah and I organized under Dean Cohen, figures from the House’s past took notice. In the fall 29

ing nts dur . k stude to blac under’s Room eaking o hael sp ecome the F Carmic uld b Stokely hat wo 0s in w the 197

The last five years of struggle stripped the House of its home-like feeling. Sometimes I wonder about what came out of our fight for the House. With the hiring of Dean Risë Nelson, and with the energy brought by the March of Resilience, we are beginning to rebuild.

of 2014, the administration told all the cultural centers that they would receive external reviews. The ears of Black alumni, who had witnessed similar processes before, immediately pricked up.

While the other directors of the three other cultural centers had notified their students about the review, Dean Cohen did not alert the House members. Upon hearing that Black students knew nothing of the University’s plans, alumna Kim Hershman ’88 sent House leaders an urgent email notifying them about the student forum portion of the review process.

After the initial open forum in November, the administration had planned two more forums in early February 2015. Micah and I decided that one of these was the moment to publicly call for Cohen’s resignation.

For several weeks, we went to groups in the Black community, urging them to sign the petition for Cohen’s removal. Not everyone did. Some students were afraid that a petition was too aggressive, and others didn’t feel 30

compelled to say anything because they knew nothing about Cohen—which, we argued, was a reflection of his absence from the House.

Ultimately, the Black Men’s Union rejected the petition, the only Black student group to do so out of the five that had connections to the majority of the House community.

We decided to confront the rift head-on. Micah met with the President of the BMU, Will Searcy ’16, and he said he understood that Dean Cohen’s conduct, which to some appeared most invested in Yale’s Black men, harmed the community. In the petition, seven women had relayed experiences of sexism with Cohen. But the general body of the BMU still voted the motion down.

Searcy said he saw rifts in attitudes toward the petition. When the BMU decided not to sign on, he said, it wasn’t out of disagreement with its organizational goals—the BMU agreed with wanting more financial transparency, clarifying the membership system, and THE NEW JOUR NAL

setting up a structure to hold deans accountable. However, he said that the petition and accompanying letters against Cohen “didn’t always focus on problems with his effectiveness,” he said. “It was more of a character attack. Guys didn’t feel comfortable signing off on that because that wasn’t the experience they had with him.”

From political decisions to social settings, gender issues in the Black student body have affected the House’s activism since its founding. At a Black Women’s Coalition meeting last spring, I heard an alumna talk about being raped by a Black male student in the nineteen-seventies. She felt she couldn’t talk about it because publicizing the story would undercut the Black student movement. How many other Black women before and after her had gone through the same experience?

Sexism in the House often operates in activist spaces.

From Bisa Williams to Caroline Jackson-Smith, who served on BSAY’s steering committee in the early seventies, women were often powerful, respected contributors to the activist work of Black Yale, but paternalism from male students could diminish their involvement.

In 1974, Yale senior Warrington Hudlin made a documentary called “Black at Yale.” In one scene, three Black women argue with a Black male peer. They’re standing on the first floor of the House, filling the lobby with their dispute. It’s heated on both sides, but I noticed a hint of a smirk on the man’s face when I saw the film.

He is so condescending, I thought, watching in the booth at the Yale Film Study Center. But maybe I’m just imagining it.

Hudlin then cuts to the same Black man as he speaks to another Black male student in an apartment. The second Black male student comments on the three women—he understands “them” now. They’re “crazy,” but “you have to deal with them!”

One of the women in the scene was Bisa Williams.

When she took over BSAY in 1975, Williams wanted to transform the group’s “petty socializing and political romanticizing” into more disciplined political conduct. In a speech outlining these changes, Williams argued that BSAY should work to better “the mental, physical, social, and political condition of all people of African descent.” In line with that vision, she proposed fundamental changes in membership requirements for BSAY members. Upset that Williams seemed to be abdicating BSAY’s role as a social support for Black students, some members splintered off to form the Black Student Union (which ended in 1976). Williams told me she believes the split was due less to differing organizational goals and more to men finding female leadership hard to swallow.

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The complex tensions between men and women in the community haven’t gone away, and they often bubble to the surface during BSAY’s annual meetings on gender, which I’ve seen turn into shouting matches.

At the beginning of our term in 2014, the BSAY board billed the year’s conversation as one about gender in the Black community, rather than at Yale in general, so that dialogue might feel less fraught.

That day, people filled the Lighten Room in the basement of the House. More than twenty Black students pulled up chairs while chatting and formed a circle, music playing softly in the background. It felt normal.

Then the meeting began. For an hour, only one of the many Black men in the room spoke. The rest sat, arms crossed, refusing to open their mouths. This was not abnormal. Union members often attended BSAY meetings in order to combat claims that BMU isolated itself from other House organizations, but they rarely contributed to meetings. This silence, however, felt different. Not disinterest, but disrespect. This meeting wasn’t about the BMU. It was about Black men and women trying to begin to heal an age-old impasse.

But what does it mean when the men most resistant to engage with the rest of the community are primarily BMU members?

Searcy, looking back at the meeting, said the men’s silence was not a BMU directive. Rather, he saw the meeting as “not an open dialogue.” He recalls feeling berated, and he said that his attendance was as a BSAY member rather than as a representative of the BMU. This was the environment in which we wrote the sixty-plus-page petition, which lacked the signatures of many black men. After its delivery at the open forum in February, we waited. Weeks later, in the midst of spring break, I found out that Dean Cohen had resigned. Just like that, it was over.

— On a March morning, I wake up to the sound of my phone. My room is dark.

“Are you up?”

It’s Micah. I’m late.

“Sure I am.”

I’m scrambling, searching for clothes, underwear, socks. Fuck. Several weeks after we found out Cohen had resigned, and yet things still seemed to be in shambles.

I stop dead. I was supposed to wake up early and write a speech for the Unite Yale rally today, a direct action aimed at building power among the people involved in activism surrounding the neglect of the cultural centers, mental health reform, and divesting from fossil fuels. I won’t be delivering the speech—I’ve 31

been replaced by Eli, a Black freshman and future vice president of BSAY, because we think my active presence might be counterproductive after my visibility in removing Cohen. Eli has a test today, so the task of writing her speech has fallen to me.

Micah and I rush to the House. Sitting in the office, thinking about how to articulate the importance of our recent victory, I think again of Bisa Williams’s advice to make it out of Yale, to not do everything ourselves.

I also think of Larry Irvin—a student who almost did not graduate.

Irvin’s story begins in the spring semester of 1974, when the Yale Political Union invited William Shockley to debate Congress of Racial Equality President Roy Innis. By 1974, Shockley, a 1956 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, had become a eugenicist and would speak on his belief that Black people were biologically inferior.

As the day of the talk approached, the Third World Coalition, led by BSAY, distributed fliers about the protest. Several hundred students crowded outside that afternoon while a group of upperclassmen and coalition leaders went inside and shouted Shockley down.

Yale gave thirteen “judicial penalties” for their participation. One was BSAY moderator Larry Irvin. Yale gave the students summer suspensions.

With the immediate threat of Shockley’s inflammatory rhetoric gone, activist attention waned. When Irvin returned to school in the fall of 1974, he held several meetings in the House, but few people came. He struggled on through the semester, which prompted Yale to ask him to take the year off. When the new BSAY moderator, Bisa Williams, asked Irvin if he wanted the Black community to advocate on his behalf, he said no.

Irvin finished his degree, but a year late. He was not the only casualty of Black student action whose academic trajectory was waylaid by the consequences of their activist work. Craig Foster ’73, a key Black leader, estimated in an archived interview that of ninety-six to one hundred Black seniors in his class, only fifty-five graduated.

I do not know Irvin personally. I do not know where he is from, and most importantly, I do not know what happened to him after. But I understand him. Suddenly, I realize what the speech is about.

I scrawl it out and speed walk from the House to the basement of Bingham where Eli is waiting. We’re assembled. Two-hundred and fifty Yale students on Cross Campus in front of Sterling Memorial Library— chanting, clapping, crying. Our hand-painted signs catch what little light peeks from behind the clouds.

32

One by one, each speaker goes up, many asking their communities to come up with them.

It’s Eli’s turn. She says: “Just recently, I found a photo of my Dad taken by my Mom while he was here—standing somewhere on Beinecke, speaking out in front of Woodbridge Hall.

It’s students like him—who in the eighties were fighting for divestment from South Africa, […] that created a legacy so that current Black Yalies could win this semester. Their energy is here right now—the Craig Fosters, the Larry Irvins, the Sylvia Boones, the Glenn DeChaberts, my mother and father. The spirit that reminds us that, as Assata said best, ‘we have the duty to fight for our people and we have the duty to win.’”

— A friend of mine once told me that someone called the House a “spiritually dead place,” and I think they’re halfway right. The last five years of struggle stripped the House of its home-like feeling. Sometimes I wonder about what came out of our fight for the House. With the hiring of Dean Risë Nelson, and with the energy brought by the March of Resilience, we are beginning to rebuild.

What is left are ghosts. The House may seem drained, but I can feel spirits in every part of the House. The founders, past directors, and the undergraduate selves of people like Irvin and Williams are all still living in this space. Some of them are there to drag us back into the worst parts of our collective pasts, preventing us from moving forward. Others are there to help us along the way.

After a long absence, I happened to walk into the House before heading to a meeting. I walked downstairs, where I ran into a friend on the verge of a breakdown, sitting on the stairs and holding back tears. I put my meeting off; we talked while she cried. I couldn’t make it better, but I could sit with her.

When we walked back to the hallway, she said, almost to herself, that I happened to show up right when she needed someone. It was like my energy, lingering in the space, had summoned me there.

It was like I was already one of the ghosts.

— Eshe Sherley is a senior in Morse College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

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TLAXCAL DREAMS of NEW HAVEN Mothers from our sister city find a hole in the border to visit their migrant children, who cope with an American Dream deferred article and photographs

by Sebi Medina-Tayac

LA S

David Mendieta leans over the railing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, holding his baby boy and glancing often at the arrivals board with heavy eyelids. A 25-year-old contractor, Mendieta woke up his wife and son before dawn for the two-hour drive from their house in West Haven to pick up his mother at the terminal. His son bats a “Welcome Home” balloon.

Tired families trickle into the lobby, all waiting for their mothers to arrive from Mexico. Anxiety mounts as light spills through the large windows, reflecting off of sterile marble tiles. They should have been here by now. Are they lost? Stuck in customs?

Finally, his mother, Doña Rosa Romero, speed-walks through the hallway, her eyes scanning the crowd.

When she sees David, she drops her aged suitcase to run and hug him tight. Today, Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016, they embrace for the first time in a decade. When they break apart, Mendieta introduces Romero to her grandson and her daughter-in-law. The four of them huddle together as a family for the first time. All around them, the throng of reunited families grows, smiling through happy tears. They pose for photos, soon to hit Facebook, accumulating Likes from relatives back home

in San Francisco, Tetlanohcan, Tlaxcala, and its sister city, New Haven, Connecticut.

David left their town at 15, compelled by economic necessity. He followed the perilous migrant trail north to New Haven, a path well trodden by many other men and women from Tlaxcala; an estimated fifteen percent of Tetlanohcan lives in New Haven. Most are undocumented migrants and cannot visit home in Mexico for fear of not being able to make it back across the tightening and increasingly dangerous border. Their mothers back in Mexico, as self-sustaining farmers (campesinas) with little to no income, cannot obtain visas to visit their relatives.

Yet Romero and twenty-two other women devised a way come to New Haven despite the distance, cruel policies, and fear. They are traveling across Connecticut and New York to perform their play, La Casa Rosa (The Pink House) at universities and theaters that vouched for them during the unpredictable process of securing a visa. Only as actresses—not as mothers—could they access three-month visas that allow them visit their children and family members. They conceived La Casa Rosa in collaboration with Daniel Carlton, a

Above: Indigenous Migrant Family Support Center (CAFAMI) members rehearse their play, La Casa Rosa, at Lehman College in the Bronx. It’s the last stop on their tour through the northeast, for which they were granted visas to visit.

Doña Rosa, second from right, has been staying in West Haven with her son who she hasn’t seen in ten years.

Previous Page: On a train for the first time in her life, Dona Chave rides the metro north from new haven to New York City for a performance of La Casa Rosa.

New York-based playwright, who came to Tetlanohcan in 2009. Since then, the women have toured La Casa Rosa in America twice, in 2010 and 2012, rehearsing for each tour at the Indigenous Migrant Family Support Center (CAFAMI) in Tetlanohcan.

Marco Castillo, a cultural anthropologist, worked with other academics, young people, and women in the community to found CAFAMI in 2007. Castillo arrived in Tetlanohcan in 2001 and saw how globalization was affecting the town: simultaneously eroding local, indigenous lifestyles and leading to large-scale migration to the United States. CAFAMI fights those forces. Now coordinated by lifelong Tetlanohcan resident Monica Lima, CAFAMI offers legal assistance, Nahuatl and English language classes, and workshops on human rights, specifically those of women and migrants.

CAFAMI helps people understand (and then work around, as with La Casa Rosa) transnational forces that affect the town. Since leaving the town for Mexico City, Castillo has reproduced this model to help other rural and indigenous communities across Mexico harness their creativity and “cultural capital … to find holes in the border” and visit loved ones.

La Casa Rosa portrays family separation and migration from Tlaxcala to the United States. Although people have left Tetlanohcan to find work for decades, they used to stay in Mexico, moving to nearby cities like Puebla or Mexico City. Only in the past two decades have people started moving to the United States despite American immigration policies that, especially after September 11, restricted movement back to Mexico.

Stories like those of Mendieta and Romero make up the backbone of the La Casa Rosa, confronting viewers with the issues of remittances, consumer culture, cultural loss, and above all, family separation.

“Half my heart is there, and half my heart is here,” said Doña Gloria Rodriguez, one of the actresses.

Now, on stages across the Northeast, the women essentially play themselves.

After the dramatic reunion at JFK, the women gather by the escalator to discuss their trip. Ruth Hernandez, a Chicana doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, organized this year’s tour. She’s been involved since she saw the play during CAFAMI’s 2010 trip, which led her to write her doctoral dissertation on Tetlanohcan. She and Monica, the coordinator in Mexico for CAFAMI, hand out sheets at the airport with La Casa Rosa’s packed two-week schedule.

After performing the play, the women will stay with their children in the United States for two more months.

They’ll cook with ingredients brought from Mexico in their heavy suitcases and care for grandchildren while their sons and daughters work. They’ll see that life in APRIL 2016

the U.S. is different from the American Dream that lured their children across the border. They’ll realize that as the struggling campesina of Tetlanohcan looks wistfully North, the tired migrante looks wistfully South—both dreaming of places that don’t quite exist.

CAFAMI’s transnational efforts allow occasional family reunions and migrants work to maintain their distinct culture, closing the distance between Tetlanohcan and New Haven. But there are no clear solutions for the pain of separation, and the families’ time together is fleeting.

— As the women of CAFAMI travel the Northeast, their neighbors in Tetlanohcan like Daniel Mendieta (no relation to David) continue to arrive to the U.S., seeking the American Dream. On a Brooklyn bus after work, Mendieta slowly peels off the Band-Aid around his index finger, wincing. His thick fingers, once accustomed to office jobs, are now covered in burns from dishwashing detergent and cuts from kitchen work. It’s harder on his hands than the campo, he says, slouching back into his seat. He’s been living on a cot in his older sister Fabiola’s cramped Brooklyn apartment since he arrived in the United States two months ago, working in the basement of a Jewish cafe. He spends his days off with family in the enclave of Tetlanohcan migrants in Brooklyn, and he often takes the train up to New Haven to visit his brothers.

Mendieta’s arrival in the United States was unusual.

Back in Mexico, he had a secure government office job in the state capital. He leveraged connections in the local government to obtain a visa to study U.S. gover-

ONLY AS ACTRESSES — NOT AS MOTHERS — COULD THEY ACCESS THREE-MONTH VISAS THAT ALLOW THEM VISIT THEIR CHILDREN AND FAMILY MEMBERS nance. Since his arrival, though, Daniel’s experience has been typical. When he moved to the U.S., his nineto-five became a nine-to-ten, eleven, or even twelve. “I come in with the light of the sun, and leave with the light of the moon,” he says. “Well, sometimes you can’t even see the moon here.” Mexicans, he said, make 37

Doña Silver prepares gorditas in her daughter’s kitchen in Brooklyn, where there exists another sizable pocket of Tetlanohcan migrants. She has been a member of CAFAMI since its founding in 2007, and has visited the U.S. as a part of the group three times.

everything in the United States run, like a machine.

When he gets back to the apartment, he absently stares at a telenovela on his sister’s gigantic TV, sipping a beer between yawns. If all goes according to plan, Daniel will bring his pregnant wife, Ana, and toddler-age son, Axel, to the United States.

“It’s really hard to make a life here. Why am I shouldering this?” he wonders. “The only thing that comes to mind is my family, the face of my son, and my daughter on the way. I have to keep the struggle going.” With the money he saves, he will be able to bring his family on a plane, instead of on foot like his pioneering siblings before him. He’ll go back to Mexico in July to get everything ready, and he will try to move to New Haven with them in September. He hopes to save enough money to start a restaurant back in Mexico and eventually pursue elected office to change policy for the better. He stares up at the ceiling and closes his eyes. He has his dreams, but everything is uncertain—many Tlaxcaltecas in the United States, like Daniel, come with a two-year plan.

— Oscar Romero’s two-year plan is on year twenty-five.

He came with his older sister, Doña Rosa, to the U.S. in 1990 in search of work. They first moved to New York City, but they quickly left for New Haven after a friend told them that there were more jobs, lower costs, 38

and fewer crowds at the other end of a Metro North line. Since age 17, Oscar has lived in the Elm City.

Dona Rosa stayed for ten years, but she returned to Tlaxcala in 2000. She missed her parents and 13-yearold son David, who she would lose again within two years when he moved north.

Oscar was one of the first members of New Haven’s now-prominent Tlaxcalteca community. He applied his skills in flooring and carpeting and built a small contracting business, hiring a few Tlaxcalteca employees. “There’s no work [in Tlaxcala]. The pay is bad and there’s lots of competition,” he said, explaining his choice to stay. Oscar obtained legal status when he married. With that, he could return home a few times every year to see family, reconnect with the community, and monitor his investments.

But the life he has built here still feels fragile. In 2008, when the economy crashed, his business tanked and he had to lay off his employees. Now, he works independently—his latest job is flooring the city’s Kensington Square apartments. He works on his kneepads in the gutted building, meticulously measuring, cutting, and pasting linoleum. “Here you can find a job, but you never stop working. The country is nice, but there is so much stress. There’s always debts, always bills to pay, but one gets used to it. I do like it here,” he THE NEW JOUR NAL

said, nodding.

Another of the first generation of migrants from Tetlanohcan, Benjamin Cuapio, was a member of New Haven’s activist group Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA).

Like Oscar’s brother Juan, Cuapio fought a labor abuse case with the help of ULA director John Jairo Lugo.

Cuapio snuck a camera into his worksite after he and other migrant workers, desperate for employment, had been hired to strip asbestos out of a building downtown without any physical or respiratory protection.

He documented the deplorable, and illegal, conditions and levied charges against his employer. The ensuing 1997 lawsuit highlighted the plight of undocumented Mexican workers in New Haven for the first time. Over the next decade, Cuapio continued to fight for migrant workers’ rights in New Haven. Due in no small part to his work with Lugo and ULA, New Haven became a sanctuary city with some of the most pro-immigrant policies in the country, encouraging many undocumented migrants to live in the city limits. Cuapio has retired from fighting to settle back into his quiet, bare concrete house at the top of a hill overlooking the Tlaxcala valley. Below him, constellations of electric lights twinkle from houses.

Cuapio has remained committed to la lucha, “the struggle,” by donating a piece of his land to CAFAMI for their community center, which he helps upkeep.

There, Romero and the others rehearsed and prepared

herbal products and hand-sewn textiles to present and sell to U.S. audiences. They carve out time for La Casa Rosa from their constant work in their fields, their businesses, and their houses.

— The women of CAFAMI traveled through the United States with the jovial bounce of tourists on vacation—after their New York City performance, they shoved onto a train in the Bronx, insisting on visiting Times Square. They visited the University of Connecticut, Lehman College, Connecticut College, and New Haven’s Bregamos, a Latino community theater in Fair Haven built from a repurposed warehouse.

The play, like every Sunday in Tetlanohcan, opens with a somber Catholic mass. It moves to an argument between two sisters over the virtues and ills of economic development in the town, as compared to traditional farming lifestyles. Then the chorus of campesinas files onto the stage. They work in the fields, hacking with wooden machetes at an invisible harvest. Under the hot lights of the stage, they wipe real sweat from their brows. A condensed version of the play follows: A YOUNG WOMAN (turning to her mother): Mom, I’m going to the United States.

MOTHER (horrified): The answer is no. You don’t have to go.

YOUNG WOMAN: Mom, please, I do have to go. I

San Francisco Tetlanohcan is a rural town in the highlands of central Mexico in the small state of Tlaxcala, under the dormant volcano La Matintzin. New Haven has been the largest destination of migrants from the town since the 1990s, and they were deemed “sister cities” in 2010. An estimated fifteen percent of the town of 10,000 lives in New Haven.

Mexico City

San Francisco Tetlanohcan

HE HAS HIS DREAMS, BUT EVERYTHING IS UNCERTAIN — MANY TLAXCALTECAS IN THE U.S., LIKE DANIEL, COME WITH A TWO-YEAR PLAN. OSCAR ROMERO’S TWO-YEAR PLAN IS ON YEAR TWENTY-FIVE.

want to go work, and live.

MOTHER (getting closer to her daughter): And what we do here isn’t working and living?

YOUNG WOMAN: I need to see the world.

MOTHER: But this is the world, too.

YOUNG WOMAN: Maybe for you.

MOTHER: I need you! How could you do this to me? Don’t you love me? Why can’t you be happy here?

YOUNG WOMAN: I need more.

MOTHER: More than your culture, your history?

Don’t you feel a responsibility to preserve your tradition?

YOUNG WOMAN: It’s boring, and it makes me sad.

I’m sorry; this is your fight, not mine.

CHORUS OF CAMPESINAS: The day my family member left, I was very sad and I cried a lot. The day my family member left, I told her how much I loved her, how much I missed her, how much I hoped she’d come back. The day my family member left, I asked the Virgin of Guadalupe and God to protect her. The day my family member left, I worried for her.

CAMPESINAS exit.

In the audience, Mendieta’s chin quivered. Other migrants in the audience wept openly while watching the women reenact one of the hardest days of their lives. After the play, the women stepped down off the stage into their family members’ arms. The families were exuberant as they danced, chatted, and drank.

A local band played popular Mexican cumbia music

40

and Coronas flowed out of the open bar. Quite the cast party.

— In his cousin’s cramped kitchen, Daniel sits by his aunt, Doña Silver, who is staying in Brooklyn with her daughter after the tour with CAFAMI. She prepares dough for gorditas, thick and saucy tortillas, enjoying her remaining weeks with her daughter. She laments not being able to use the corn from their family plot for the dough—she has to settle for bleached white Maseca (dry dough) found in Latino supermarkets across the United States. That seems to be the only domestic ingredient. She brought chiles and other dry vegetables from Mexico to make the orange salsa with which she doused the chubby oval gorditas. Her two children here in New York will miss her cooking when she leaves, since work often prevents them from preparing time-intensive traditional dishes. But in the three months she’s been here, her two children back home miss her cooking, too.

Back at JFK on April 17, the migrant families say goodbye to their mothers. Not a single person interviewed in that airport had slept the night before—they stayed awake packing, talking, and bracing themselves for this moment. The script of “the day my family member left” is reversed as sons and daughters watch their mothers shuffle through security to catch their flight back to Mexico. This time, there are more tears than at the reunion in February. Although the CAFAMI trips alleviate some of the longing over the course of a few surreal and hectic months, the women’s inevitable departure for home reopens a wound that has yet to scar over. No one knows how long they will go without seeing their mothers again. Mendieta hugs his son close to his chest as his mother walks away, looking over her shoulder, eyes strained. In the Mexico City airport, her husband and children eagerly await her return. They’ve never been without her for so long, and they miss her.

— Sebi Medina-Tayac is a senior in Davenport College

THE NEW JOUR NAL

ENDNOTE

WHAT'S IN A GAME

Finding New Haven in BORDERLANDS, pistol in hand Elena Saavedra Buckley

Early on in BORDERLANDS, I pick up a pink gun called the “Lady Finger” from behind a grave. It’s a curvy, single-barreled pistol, and I grip it in my right hand’s fingerless glove. When I press “tab” to look at its specs, the words “Omnia vincit amor” (“Love conquers all”) pop up in red. I, Lilith—a Human Siren from the planet Dionysus—store it in my backpack, next to my submachine gun, and continue towards New Haven.

The Lady Finger quickly becomes my favorite weapon, mostly because its magnifying scope lets me shoot enemies from far away. I can feel safe from a distance and clever from the periphery, standing on a sandy cliff or crouching behind a sheet of rusty metal.

Things get complicated, though, when I’m attacked by “skags,” the resident pests of BORDERLANDS, which look like mutant wild dogs. They run great distances to attack me, and a scope doesn’t help much when one’s gnawing at my legs.

Up-close encounters are an unavoidable part of the road to New Haven, the virtual city I’m trying to reach on the planet Pandora. It’s a part of the universe of BORDERLANDS, the popular role-playing, first-person shooter video game made by Gearbox Software APRIL 2016

in 2009. BORDERLANDS’s version of New Haven is described online as: …the zone and town that is located in a vast junkyard between The Dahl Headlands and The Rust Commons West. It was founded by the former inhabitants of what is now Old Haven.

Old Haven is currently occupied by The Crimson Lance, a private military force that took over after “the colonization of Pandora went bad.” The BORDERLANDS story exists in the aftermath of that turn, which happened when rumors of an ancient vault filled with alien weapon technology went public.

I start a single-player game with the purple-haired Lilith, the only female avatar. She was cast out of New Haven by a cyborg named Wilhelm. I—we—jump off a rickety bus in a town called Fyrestone and begin our journey to her old home.

My desire to reach New Haven comes from an incandescent hope that the virtual New Haven will parallel the real-life city. The only nod towards Connecticut on the BORDERLANDS Wikia is in the “Trivia” section, which reads: “The famous Winchester Repeating Arms Company was located in ‘New Haven,’ Connecticut,” 41

meaning the only obvious connection between the virtual city and its real-life counterpart is “guns.” But part of me still believes that unlocking the BORDERLANDS map could, in turn, unlock a crucial part of this city’s character.

Lilith, New Haven, and the entire BORDERLANDS universe first existed in the head of Matthew Armstrong.

He was the lead designer of BORDERLANDS and BORDERLANDS 2, and while he left Gearbox Software a year ago for what he tweeted were “new adventures,” he hasn’t forgotten the games. After getting in touch with him (on Twitter) and telling him about my quest to New Haven, we exchange a series of emails— he doesn’t respond to requests for a phone call. His answers are always written in orange. (“Because they’re LEGENDARY,” he explains.)

“The theme of BORDERLANDS has always been ‘isolated people finding family,’” he wrote. “Mind you, this is in the middle of people shooting and killing and acting all crazy, but that’s just the fun coating on the outside.” Traveling across barren landscapes, I along with other Vault Hunters are at the mercy of stoic rock formations, apocalyptic decay, and endless skags. Brief moments of safety serve as stepping stones to the treasure.

“New Haven is home,” Armstrong writes me when I ask about its place in the game. “You really want the player to feel a connection to the hubs because that adds some bit of weight to the combat.” That connection is difficult for the designers, though. It forces them to quickly forge a sense of belonging before the player moves onto the next location, especially since the map is a mystery until a player reaches it.

While the game starts out with simple missions, it gets tough when I have to confront “bosses,” the more powerful villains blocking the way to new locations. I tell

I’M RIGHT OUTSIDE THE GATE TO NEW HAVEN, BUT NOW, THE GATE IS LOCKED. WHEN I DEFEAT MAD MEL IN A FLAMING MONSTER TRUCK STADIUM, A ROBOT CALLED A CLAPTRAP LEADS ME TO THE BARRIER.

Armstrong that I’m having trouble defeating the brawny Bone Head, and he cautions me that there’s more to it than the final result.

BORDERLANDS, he says, is more than just its “golden path” of Main Quests. To advance, I have to complete Side Quests, too. They don’t lead me to New Haven directly, but with each completed Side Quest, I become a more integrated resident of Pandora. After collecting some magical seeds for a friend in Skag Gully, I level up. I approach Bone Head from behind, destroy his shield with two shots to the head, and take him down with a couple close-range bullets. I realize that I can’t get by with keeping at a distance, such as that allowed by the Lady Finger—I can’t play BORDERLANDS if I don’t interact with the world of it.

After leaving Fyrestone, I make it to the Dahl Headlands. It’s more of a dingy campout than a civilized settlement, crawling with tiny axe-wielding men called “psychos.” I’m right outside the gate to New Haven, but now, the gate is locked. When I defeat Mad Mel in a flaming monster truck stadium, a robot called a claptrap leads me to the barrier. It types in a code with its insect arms, and I teleport inside.

In New Haven, houses have decayed into landfill heaps. The sky droops in chemical yellow, held up by smoke stacks. After passing under a corroded metal arch, I wander through what used to be a town intersection, where characters loiter in front of makeshift shacks. I can press “E” to talk to them—“Ever thought about settling down? We could use someone like you around here,” one says. The supplies I previously found in hightech boxes now hide in old washing machines. Nothing here is familiar to me. The streets made of packed dirt and are nothing like the ones I use to get to class.

“We didn’t name it after New Haven,” Armstrong writes. The map is merely “an early town in a dangerous frontier,” meant to give “a sense of safety and provide a reminder about the town the settlers left behind.”

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I’m not even sure how the New Haven I know could be communicated through a desert landscape, especially an animated one.

Even in a virtual world, there’s no being in two places at once, and trying to learn about a real city—the one I live in—through the eyes of a video game character is a little like trying to use the Lady Finger as an all-purpose weapon: clumsy.

But even without the familiarity, I feel sustainably safe. Skags, bandits, and psychos don’t flood out of every open door. For the first time, no one wants to kill me. I make myself at home.

— Elena Saavedra Buckley is a sophomore in Silliman College. She is an editor-in-chief of The New Journal.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

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