Volume 48 - Issue 2

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

VOL 48/ ISS 3 / OCT 2015

T HE NEW JOUR N A L

What’s Left Money from New Haven Remakes a Rural Mexican Town

Behind

editors-in-chief maya averbuch caroline sydney managing editor isabelle taft senior editors hayley byrnes kendrick mcdonald lara sokoloff associate editors ruby bilger joyce guo sophie haigney libbie katsev elena saavedra buckley copy editors douglas plume spencer bokat-lindell design editors chris paolini ivy sanders-schneider edward wang photo editor jennifer lu web designer mariah xu

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

web developer philippe chlenski with support from

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 2015 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. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. 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.

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THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 48

issue 3

october 2015

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

feature 30

What’s Left Behind Money from New Haven remakes a rural Mexican town Sebi Medina-Tayac

standards 4

letter to the editor Kevin Su

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points of departure Brady Currey & Victorio Cabrera & Amelia Nierenberg

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snapshot The Second Frontline Semhal Tsegaye

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poetry Justine Cefalu

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essay Sacar Devon Geyelin

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critical angle The Brightest Among Us Ceri Godinez

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poetry Ruby Bilger

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endnote Olivia Klevorn OCTOBER 2015

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A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

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“Manufacturing Cool,” the September issue’s pop-music story, has an ambiguous title — it stands there without a time, without a subject, without a place. But the author, Jordan Coley, is happy to locate who is doing this “manufacturing” at Yale right now, and it happens to be people and places dear to me. As a member of WYBC for the past four years and an executive board member for the last two, and a current resident of 216, I felt that my organization, my home, and my character were attacked.

Coley writes of “a number of acts on campus embracing a less accessible sound”— who are these acts? Coley writes that “students […] cultivate what some would call a more ‘alternative’ type of music”— again, which students are doing this cultivating, and also, who are the “some” that are calling it alternative? To me, these vague terms, which no one can really refute outright, display a lack of thorough investigation. But the greatest objection I have to this underreporting is how conveniently it lends itself to a reductive portrait of Yale.

Coley writes: “You would probably find it hard to believe that [Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”] — or one like it — would ever be performed at 216, the dim basement venue that features local and student bands. There is an accepted division: bands and independent performers at Yale are the indie rockers, bar spitters, jazz players, electronic DJs, R&B singers — the ‘alternative.’

Pop blares from the speakers of a crowded party or is preceded by a pitch pipe.”

Who accepts this division, exactly? Certainly not me. Certainly not the people who dedi-cate themselves to bringing shows to 216, and certainly not the bands that play there. To provide just one concrete example from a show at 216 — which is more than there are in the article — our most well-attended shows last year were headlined by Slam Dank, a group whose own lead singer Keren Abreu calls a pop act. Keren is just one person whose tastes and craft complicate the simple narrative of this article, and I refuse to believe that she is an exception. The pop-music makers in this article share a feeling that they are judged, as Sarah Solovay succinctly puts it, because “the kind of music you make reflects how complex you are, so making mainstream music exposes you as shallow or basic.” I don’t doubt that her experiences have led her to believe this, but when I think back on a basement full of eager Slam Dank fans, it is clear to me that this is not every pop musician’s nor every pop fan’s experience at Yale.

While the article reads like reportage about “manufacturing cool” on this campus, it glosses over its own role in this manufacture. When Coley calls “the indie rockers, bar spitters, jazz players, electronic DJs, R&B singers” alternative, he manufactures his own definition of the genre. One only needs to think of Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Diplo, and Mariah Carey to realize that not all pop acts fit into his narrow (and remarkably white) model of “Pop that birthed talents like Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber” and to see how poorly such a division between pop and alternative holds up. When Chris Capello, one of the few sources, accuses a party at 216 of playing Taylor Swift alongside PC Music as a display of coolness, he crafts a cynical image of people obsessed with status, leaving out the possibility that people were just enjoying the music.

Good, responsible journalism does not thrust definitions and worldviews onto people who may not share them. It does not ignore the complexities of subjects as vast as mainstream culture in the United States or as contained as the music scene on campus. I write this not just as member of WYBC and a resident of 216, but also as a reader who expects better from the things we write and publish at Yale.

Kevin Su THE NEWCollege JOURN’16 AL Morse

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

OWNING THE WILDERNESS Inside the university’s largest piece of property Brady Currey

illustrations by téa chai OCTOBER 2015

i eased the suv down a rough dirt road in northeastern Connecticut. My friend Téa, who sat in the passenger’s seat, peered into the shady woods ahead. She checked her phone to see if we were still headed in the right direction, but she didn’t have any service. Her hands fiddled with pens and papers, nervously sketching the twisted shapes of branches and leaves as we went around the next bend.

Then we were there, at Myers Forest, the largest of Yale’s seven forests. More specifically, we were at a campground that the Yale School of Forestry has used since 1919. We’d been driving around the forest for the last twenty minutes, weaving around groves of oak, hemlock, and pine. There’s a reason the trip was so long: Myers Forest is the largest piece of Yale property and one of the largest private forests in southern New England. On the drive over from i - 84, we had traced the northern edge of the nearly eight thousand acres.

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Trees lit by the fiery colors of fall rimmed the shallow lakes alongside the road. Ahead of us, the tangled woods opened into a small clearing. A few long, low wooden buildings—bunkhouses for when the forest has guests—were scattered across the field. They are mainly used in August when the first-year forestry students have orientation, or when the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies holds seminars. Last winter, for example, the School held a community lecture on tracking animals in forests. Professors also use the camp as a staging ground for the forty-five research projects currently being run at the forest.

Some projects study the economics of forestry, looking for new ways to make conservation cheaper. One of many ecosystem projects focuses on the forest’s vernal pools, seasonal bodies of water that dictate the life cycle of salamanders.

We tend to think of the wilderness as a place to be protected from the relentless economic forces of human expansion, lest it be lost forever. But Myers Forest stands as living evidence that this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Myers is a place where we look under the hood of forests, examining the forces that drive their dynamism and resilience. Rather than loss, it tells a story of reclamation: its roots run deep through old farmland, across property abandoned during the age of westward expansion.

Only one hundred years ago, Myers Forest was a patchwork of farms in various states of decay. Now, vines cover the remnants of building foundations. Each rainy season, dirt and silt fill the old wells. To the trained eye, the composition of the forest contradicts its youth: it’s almost entirely filled with hardwood trees, like oak and maple, which can only grow after pine trees take root in empty fields and provide shade for seedlings.

But this reclamation has been guided and shaped by foresters, whose job it is to make forests environmentally and economically sustainable. They meticulously catalogue, tree by tree, to maximize the diversity and health of the species in the forest. Today, the forest is managed completely by Yale. It is the home of the Quiet Corner 6

Initiative, a partnership that pairs the School of Forestry with local private landowners, natural resource managers, and forest professionals to improve the health of forests across the state.

I tracked down Professor Mark Ashton, the director of the School forest system, who gave me a brief overview of Myer’s ecological importance and history. We sat around a fire pit next to the crumbling foundation of a barn. He talked about the broader importance of New England’s forests: “Water filters down through the canopy, through the root system, and into the rivers and aquifers we get our drinking water from,” he told me, gesturing to the leaves and needles around us. “Urban planners in the Northeast realized that we had to protect our surface watershed by planting trees.”

According to Ashton, the rich network of forests in New England, most of which was planted in the last hundred years, is one of the main reasons our drinking water is some of the best in the nation. “Without forests—in places like Louisiana, for example—instead of spending millions of dollars on a system that nature helps clean, you end up spending billions designing and engineering THE NEW JOURN AL

a system to get to the same water quality.” Nationally, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that replacing our forest ecosystems with engineered filters would cost more than 270 billion dollars.

In the early 1800s, only thirty to forty percent of the region remained forested after waves of settlers made their mark. But as the country expanded, farmers abandoned their plots when they couldn’t compete with crops shipped by rail from the Midwest. Urban planners leapt at the chance to protect watersheds, purchasing vast tracts of land to ensure their preservation. Today, thick woods cover about seventy-five percent of New England—a surprising comeback driven in part by the economic forces often seen as anathema to conservation efforts.

After my visit, I spoke with Julius Pasay, the manager of the University forest system, in order to learn about what lies ahead for Myers Forest. Pasay makes executive decisions about the composition of the plots of land. He keeps Myers Forest as healthy as he can but he isn’t trying to return it to its “natural state” from before human contact. “What is a natural state?” Pasay said. “People have been interacting with the forests of New England for tens of thousands of years, and the distribution and migration

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patterns of species have been changing ever since the last ice age.”

The biggest changes in forest’s composition have been caused, unsurprisingly, by humans. Pasay told me about the chestnut blight started by a fungus from a Japanese-imported plant. It killed forty billion trees in the early 1900s.

“These trees were everywhere, and you could just eat chestnuts right off of them.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “What would society be like if we still had those trees, if everyone had free access to food?”

Thoughts like this inform some of his most audacious plans for Myers Forest. Pasay has just finished planting an experimental “agroforest,” a network of different fruit and nut trees that has the potential to provide valuable habitats for threatened species and increase food yield. I asked him when he’ll know how successful he’s been, and he laughed. “Maybe in ten or twenty years? That’s the difference between agriculture and forestry—you work on a timescale of decades. I don’t mind, though. It feels like you’re paying it forward.”

— Brady Currey is a junior in Saybrook College

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THE MURDER TRAIL The paranormal reanimates a stalled investigation Victorio Cabrera

i a m s i t t i n g in Jillian and Scott Hamilton’s kitchen.

It is small and crowded with the essentials of home life—a blender on the countertop, papers pinned to the fridge, plates on a rack. Scott Hamilton lets out a theatrical groan and gives me a weary look.

“So. You like the paranormal, huh?”

Jillian and Scott certainly do, though they did not get much choice in the matter: the supernatural has been present throughout their lives. When Scott was 8 years old, a ball he was holding rolled out of his hand and into the basement of his parents’ home. As he retrieved it, he saw a recently deceased neighbor hanging from the rafters. It was a vision, but it looked as real as anything he had ever seen. Jillian has twice seen ghosts replay their murders for her. Once, when she was touring a house, she saw a young woman who had been killed in the master bedroom. They do not regard these visions as hallucinations: for Jillian and Scott, these occurrences are the intersection of the spiritual realm and ours.

Scott works in a Macy’s warehouse and Jillian is a seamstress, but their preferred vocation is Family Haunts, a paranormal research group dedicated to studying these intersections. Connecticut, Scott tells me, is “the most haunted state in the country” and, as a result, is crowded with paranormal research groups. Like many of these groups, Family Haunts investigates hauntings, 8

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illustrations by chris paolini

from demons to poltergeists; they also have a stake in the smaller field of demonic possessions. But that is not enough to stand out in a paranormal research scene that Scott calls “cutthroat,” and where the only currency is exposure. As a rule, paranormal research groups do not charge for their services. Two years ago, to raise their profile, Family Haunts started investigating cold cases. They have worked on three to date; one was independently resolved, and the other two are ongoing. Since March of this year, they have been focusing on the murder of 39 - year - old Dawn DelVecchio.

On July 23, 2005, DelVecchio was housesitting for a friend in East Haddam, Connecticut. After she stopped responding to calls, her mother reported her missing on July 24. Two days later, police found DelVecchio’s asphyxiated body in an upstairs closet of her friend’s house.

The police investigated, but no arrest was ever made.

No suspects were officially named, and little information about the murder is publicly available. The detective in charge, Jeff Payette, would only tell me it was an “active investigation.”

The family was devastated; her mother had a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. Lenny Paquette, DelVecchio’s uncle, felt he was the only one who could seek closure for DelVecchio and her family. He has been doing so for ten years, talking to the media as the family’s spokesman, asking online for information about the murder, and meeting with police.

“I love Dawn,” Paquette said. “I would pull out all the stops until I leave here to find out who did it.”

Paquette has always believed in the supernatural—he consulted with a sensitive (a psychic, in layman’s terms) during the period when DelVecchio was reported missing, and he describes paranormal experiences as one of his “journeys in life.” But Paquette also believes there are many supernatural charlatans, so when he saw Scott posting online about his paranormal cold-case task force, he was interested but skeptical. They met for the first time in March. When Paquette meets a sensitive for the first time, he divulges nothing, making the sensitive prove his or her skills. He did so with Jillian, who is an empathic sensitive, one highly attuned to other people’s thoughts. She started describing DelVecchio and the murder with startling OCTOBER 2015

accuracy, saying, for example, that she felt DelVecchio was “imprisoned” by her home life.

“I was like ‘yes, yes, yes,’” Paquette recalls, snapping his fingers with each yes. “No one would know that.”

Paquette was convinced Family Haunts was the real deal; Scott and Jillian felt there was enough material for an investigation. They have been working together since.

On a night in May of this year, they carried out a paranormal investigation at DelVecchio’s gravesite. Scott took pictures and recorded video. Jillian, with a tape recorder running, asked DelVecchio’s spirit questions. Afterwards, Scott pored over these, looking for any trace of the supernatural.

“Can you give us a sign you’re here? What happened? Is there anything you want to communicate with your family?”

They were hoping to get responses, which in the business are called Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVP. An audio professional processed the recordings from the cemetery, and Paquette and Scott think there is a voice—maybe DelVecchio’s—responding, saying “generator room.” There was a generator room in the home of one of the people Scott and Paquette suspect of committing the murder.

Of the pictures they took, they say one stands out: it is like any photo of a cemetery at night, with shadowy trees and headstones, but superimposed over two of the trees, Paquette and Scott see the faces of DelVecchio and one of her children.

I never got to see the picture or hear the recordings.

It would be easy to be cynical about all this, to dismiss digital artifacts and distorted audio and confirmation bias.

I could roll my eyes and say that ghosts don’t exist and talk about the reality TV show to which every paranormal researcher aspires. But when I look at Paquette, who carries on the investigation out of his love for DelVecchio, or when I think of Scott going to cemeteries in the night and poring over the tapes afterwards, I set aside any cynicism.

I think about the death of a loved one, about a universe that is just atoms bumping together in the void, and I wish I could see the visions, discern the faces among the trees, hear the voices rising out of the grey noise.

— Victorio Cabrera is a sophomore in Trumbull College 9

A LOVE OF LABOR Yale’s midwives help women take ownership of childbirth Amelia Nierenberg

nurse midwife nancy degennaro demonstrated straddling positions on a large exercise ball for Rose Gallegos, an expecting mother sitting next to her. “Sometimes we would have her sit on it this way,” Degennaro said, squatting on the ball, opening her legs wide, acting out Gallegos’s possible future delivery. “Sometimes we have her lean on it this way,” she said, moving to rest her flat tummy on the ball. “We just get creative.”

Getting creative is part of the birthing philosophy in Yale’s midwifery department, located at Yale–New Haven Hospital’s St. Raphael campus on Chapel Street. An alternative to the ob/gyn maternity ward, the department staffs midwives, who are licensed to deliver children and provide holistic birth-related care. Mothers are encouraged to take ownership of the birthing process. Instead of lying flat on their backs in a hospital bed, they move around, play birth playlists, and order takeout. There are exercise balls used for sitting and bouncing to open the pelvis, a bar that allows for pushing while in a squat position, and tubs and showers for hydrotherapy. Mothers can decide to give birth on all fours in a large, lavender-scented tub.

Dana Oakes-Sand is a doula, meaning that she is trained to provide emotional support before, during, and after birth but does not have a medical degree. “I had a patient play Skrillex while giving birth,” she told me.

“That was an experience.”

With warm lighting, ambient instrumental music, and large photographs of newborn babies, the midwifery department looks and feels a little like a womb— comforting, quiet, red-tinted. During a tour of the department for October’s National Midwifery Week, nurse-midwife Erin McMahon reached up to brush a crumb off my sweater, a bracelet inscribed with “Kindness Changes Everything” sliding up her arm. Traditional boundaries of personal space seem to melt away.

Nearly every midwife, nurse, or doula would nudge me to make a point, or let their hands rest on my arm while we laughed. Someone even grabbed a pen from my back pocket while my hands were full.

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Although ob/gyns meet with patients many times before the birth, the visits tend to be physical exams. Nurse Katie Brady, who has been at ynhh for thirty years, sees midwife care as a more holistic alternative. “The difference between midwifery care and the, how shall I say it?” she asked, turning to her co-workers, “the traditional medical model? … It’s more supportive, a more calming environment.”

Founded in 1956, Yale’s professional midwifery program is one of the oldest in the country. It was born during a period of decline in midwifery, as ob/gyns replaced midwives as the primary caregivers for pregnant women in the 1950s. Practicing nurse Michelle Telfer attributes the shift away from midwives to changing attitudes toward women’s health in the early twentieth century. “Pregnancy came to be seen more as pathological, more as a disease to be treated, more as a danger to women’s health,” she said.

As birth became clinical, midwives’ traditional approach led to the stereotype that they were “unclean witches with gnarled hands,” said associate professor of nursing Heather Reynolds. ob/gyns delivered almost all American babies until the feminist revolution of the 1970s when, Reynolds said, “women started to look for alternatives to heavy sedation and started to demand a family birth experience.” This shifted ob/gyn practices—fathers were allowed in the delivery room for the first time, and caregivers began to emphasize nutrition, cultural needs, and the physical changes of pregnancy. This change in attitudes also led to an uptick in midwife-assisted births. (According to the Centers for Disease Control, between 1975 and 2002, the percentage of midwife-assisted births rose from less than one percent to 8.2 percent.)

Midwives try to maintain an air of unique approachability. The word “midwife” comes from the Germanic Middle English root of “mid” (meaning with) and “wife” (meaning woman): “with-woman.” The etymology reveals the their role as one of accompaniment and support. As explained to me by Richard Jennings, the only male nurse-midwife on the Yale team, “midwife” refers to the gender of the mother, THE NEW JOURN AL

rather than the healthcare provider. “What do you call a male midwife?” he asked me. “A midwife?” I answered, confused. “No,” he joked. “A delivery boy.”

In America, most babies are still delivered by an ob/ gyn. In almost every other country, midwives, both male and female, deliver most children, with ob/gyns only involved when complications occur. According to OakesSand, American women fear birth and labor pain more than women in other cultures. She pointed to a study in which scientists asked women in Japan whether they were afraid of childbirth, and their responses indicated that they seemed surprised that anyone would be. Describing her sense of the prevailing attitude in Japan, she said, “I might be afraid of a tsunami, or a volcano, but birth? Why would I be afraid of birth?”

For many American women, childbirth is pathologized—an event of hospitals, screaming, and whitecoated doctors. “We are taught to fear pain,” practicing nurse midwife Michelle Telfer said, “but labor pain is different.” Many ob/gyns try to eliminate pain with epidurals, which numb women from the waist down. Though midwives offer epidurals, they prefer to use alternative methods of pain management. “It doesn’t mean she has to go through it unmedicated,” said Telfer, “but our bodies work, and it can be a very powerful experience for women to go through that process.” Back in the labor room, Degennaro pointed to a tank of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, which some women use to alleviate pain and relax.

Animatedly, she told of one woman’s birthing process in which, “We laughed her baby out.”

“Laughing a baby out” constitutes a radically different image than the conventional one of an American soonto-be-mom: sweat-drenched, screaming, flat on her back.

Looking around at the props in the labor room, giving birth with a midwife seems more like a new exercise class fad than The Most Painful Experience Ever.

Yale’s health care plan does not cover birth through midwifery for undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty. The only option available under the Yale health plan is an ob/gyn birth. Among American health care plans, this is fairly common.

Still, the ubiquity of ob/gyn births in the United States can come as a shock to people from other countries—most international health care plans do cover midwifery care. At Yale, Telfer said, the response of many foreign faculty and graduate students is, “What do you mean, we don’t have midwife care?”

When I met Sarah, a young Israeli doctoral student, she was bouncing her nine-month-old daughter, cooing to her. Sarah, whose name has been changed at her request, delivered her daughter with an ob/gyn via OCTOBER 2015

cesarean section. As C-sections go, she said, she had the best possible experience, but she would have preferred a vaginal delivery.

Though these procedures are routine and low-risk, a cesarean section is, as Telfer described it, “major abdominal surgery” that should be used only as a last resort.

The cdc reports that 32.7 percent of American women gave birth via C-section in 2013, more than double the recommended regional rate of the World Health Organization. As one nurse, who wished to remain anonymous, said, the mindset of many in the medical field is such that “one intervention”—such as an epidural—“leads to another,”—such as an episiotomy, the cutting of the vagina to allow the baby more room—“to another,”—a C-section. Midwives, who generally employ fewer interventions, have C-section rates of six percent.

Sarah believes that she could have avoided a C-section had she worked with a midwife. “I just thought the C-section was unnecessary,” she said, shrugging. “I had perfect conditions: I am big, I had a small baby, I had full dilation. I pushed and pushed and pushed and for three hours, she didn’t come out. I am sure that if I would have been moving…” Sarah trailed off. But believes that the alternative tactics of midwifery, like walking, would have allowed her to give birth vaginally.

Women and couples covered by the Yale Health Plan seeking midwife care have two options: give birth with an ob/gyn or pay out of pocket. This often proves too costly—according to the pregnancy website What to Expect, a birthing center birth costs about three thousand dollars. Telfar explained that many of her patients who pay out of pocket choose a home birth, which can cost as little as fifteen hundred dollars. “It’s cheaper overall,” she said, “but for women who don’t feel comfortable with that, they don’t have much of an option.”

“I would have come here, [to the midwifery ward] if it had been covered,” Sarah said. “I tried. I asked if I can, they said no, and so I just accepted it.” Sarah intends to purchase another health care plan to have her next child at St. Raphael’s midwifery department.

Though women like Sarah turn to midwives to gain more control over their births, midwifery remains unpopular among New Haven residents and Americans alike— hence the need for tours like the one in October. As I packed my camera away and readied myself to leave, nurse-midwife Melanie Albright shrugged. “We help them write their own stories,” she said of the mothers she and the other Yale midwives have helped. “Anything we can do to get the word out.” With that, she turned to show another small group around the floor.

— Amelia Nierenberg is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College 11

SNAPSHOT

THE SECOND FRONTLINE Afghan interpreters face the costs of political refuge Semhal Tsegaye as we walk down the unlit hallway of his apartment near West River Memorial Park in New Haven, Reza Noori allows me just a glance into the bedroom that he shares with two other men. Their mattresses lie edgeto-edge on the floor. Smiling shyly, he pushes back his full, black curls. He’s tired from his day of work at a deli in Westport, bookended by an hour-long commute in rush hour traffic. “What I am earning here, this is not enough for me to live, spend for college, and also support my family. So my living conditions are not good, but I live with that. It is okay,” Noori says.

After working as a translator for the United States armed forces in Afghanistan, Noori was one of eighteen recipients of the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) bound for New Haven. Established in 2009, the visa program aids Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked for U.S. forces in their home countries. In order to receive an SIV, Noori had to prove that he was employed by the U.S. forces for at least one year and had experienced serious threats due to this service.

Letters of recommendation attested to his four years of hard work.

“When you’re working for Americans, when you risk your life, you’re under threat every second, every time, every day, every morning, every night,” Noori says. “You can’t trust anybody, you can’t trust your neighbors, you can’t trust even your relatives because they can be in connection with the Taliban.”

Noori received his visa through the SIV program in 2013, two years after applying, because the background checks of the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security take a prohibitively long time. Between 2009 and 2013, Congress authorized 7,900 Afghan visas through the SIV program, but due to political backlog, only around two thousand were issued. According to the Associated Press, a diplomatic cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry in 2010 voiced a fear that “the SIV program could drain [Afghanistan] of our very best civilian and military partners: our Afghan employees.” Eikenberry also proposed to make the legal standard of “ongoing serious threat” more stringent, making it harder to issue SIVs. The U.S. government does not release the number of SIV applicants, but in total, fifty thousand Iraqis and Afghans are estimated to have worked as interpret12

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David Williams (left) Reza Noori (right)

photo courtesy of reza noori

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ers for U.S. troops during a decade and a half of war.

After years of protests by Afghan translators, stories of SIV applicants getting killed by the Taliban while they waited for their visas, and fears that the program would end when coalition combat forces withdrew, Congress expanded the total allotment of SIVs by four thousand in 2014. But this addition has not made the bureaucracy move faster. By late March 2015, more than thirteen thousand Afghan applicants were still waiting for their paperwork to be processed.

Like many interpreters, Noori hoped that his work would enable him to have a comfortable life in the U.S, with a shot at a professional degree. But, as he balances a job at a deli and English coursework at Gateway Community College, he is struggling to reach this goal.

We meet at Gateway one fall evening, where he is working on homework following a day of classes. After greeting me with a wide smile and a handshake, he tells me how he configures his schedule so that he can work and attend classes part-time. He hopes his education will prepare him for better jobs in the U.S. David Williams, the American civilian advisor for whom Noori was an interpreter, believes that young Afghan men like Noori become interpreters partly because they want to come to the U.S. When Noori found out he was being resettled in New Haven, Williams helped him find the city on a map and tried to give him an idea of his soon-to-be home. “I knew the background of New Haven and Yale University,” Williams says. “And I was like, Noori, I’m telling you brother... look where they sent [you]: to the hub of one of the best universities in the world. Maybe or maybe not you go there, but you’re gonna be in that environment and just being in that environment, you’re gonna grow.”

EVEN WHILE HE DREAMS OF REUNITING WITH HIS FAMILY HERE, HE CONSIDERS WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO GO BACK TO AFGANISTAN IN THE DISTANT FUTURE But between a full schedule of work and school, along with the stress of worrying about his family in Afghanistan, Noori’s reality has been far removed from 14

Yale. His only exposure to the University has been through a College alum, assigned as a cultural companion by the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS).

Williams, who worked at the Afghan National Police (ANP) Command Center in Kabul, estimates that he’s worked with hundreds of interpreters, and Noori was one of two for whom he decided to write a letter of recommendation. He remembers Noori as “very educationally-oriented” and well respected among their colleagues. The two worked side-by-side, advising high-ranking Afghan officials who were training the ANP. “They’re essential to the police mission,” Williams says of his interpreters. “How do you communicate with this [Afghan official] without a language assistant?”

In New Haven, Noori lives alongside other former interpreters who are struggling to make lives for themselves. As we stand in the kitchen, his flatmates pile out of the car carrying groceries, and we walk out of the house to meet them. Noori grasps the hand of each man in greeting and introduces me to his cousin, Ahmad Fawad, who is slightly shorter and more outspoken than Noori. He has light wrinkles on the corners of his eyes. Also unmarried, Fawad came to the U.S. alone.

After decades of war that ravaged the country’s infrastructure, Fawad says that facilitating the work between the coalition forces and the ANP was a way to support peace. “I wanted to work with them to help my people.

To have a better life and better security in my country,” Fawad says. By the time the Taliban took control of Afghanistan at the onset of the 1996 civil war, Fawad’s family had fled for Kabul. He was out of school for seven years, unwilling to submit to the violent authority of teachers in the Taliban-run classroom.

Fawad recalls a near-death experience when he was accompanying an American firearms team. Before entering a shooting range, they detected an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) intended for them. Thankfully, they were able to avoid it.

Oftentimes, interpreters are called on to enter highrisk situations such as these because their language skills are indispensible. But the support offered to them is far less than what is given to U.S. soldiers and veterans, Noori points out. While the U.S. troops that the interpreters work with can make upwards of five figures per year, Noori made 425 dollars each month while working with the U.S in Afghanistan. Today, far from his family and far from his home, he makes about fifteen to sixteen hundred dollars a month He pays around 180 dollars per month to share a bedroom with three other men in order to cope with the high living costs in New Haven.

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Noori claims there is not adequate support for refugees trying to plan for long-term futures in the U.S. In December of 2014, the New Haven Independent covered Noori and other interpreters’ grievances with IRIS, which is the first point of contact for most refugees or immigrants who come to New Haven. IRIS receives funding from the U.S. Department of State, Health and Human Services, and an array of private companies and churches, but it is often underfunded.

And with just seven case managers to oversee the two hundred refugees IRIS re-settles annually, it is often understaffed. The organization allocates a 925-dollar lump sum for each refugee to spend in the first three months, primarily on rent, utilities, and other basic necessities, but then refugees are largely on their own.

Even a good degree from Afghanistan doesn’t count for much in the U.S, so former interpreters like Noori have to work low-wage jobs. Noori studied for about three years at Kabul University in Afghanistan, but he had to start his education over again in the U.S. If he continues his studies at his current pace, he is about two years from finishing his degree. While he is committed to succeeding in the U.S, he mentions that some interpreters prefer to try their chances in Afghanistan rather than struggling here.

Noori and Fawad stay in contact with their families in Afghanistan over Facebook and Skype and wait until the day they bring their families to the U.S. The SIV program issues visas only to the principal applicant, their spouse, and unmarried children under 21 years old, but not to applicants’ fathers, mothers, or siblings. After five years of living in the U.S, interpreters can use the green cards they are issued to bring their families. Noori’s parents, two brothers, and two sisters are currently waiting for him to bring them to the U.S, the fear of reprisal from the Taliban looming over them.

Even while he dreams of reuniting with his family here, he considers what it would be like to go back to Afghanistan in the distant future, perhaps with a doctorate that would enable him to work as a minister or a member of parliament. Maybe he would join the U.S. military to work both in Afghanistan and gain the benefits of being a U.S. soldier. For now, the Afghanistan that Noori, Fawad, and the other interpreters hope to see is not within reach. Nor is the life that they expected in the U.S., where they’ve now had to suspend their dreams. Despite these disappointments, Noori says that he would work with U.S. forces again if he could.

Noori and his housemates wash a plate of apples from the recently bought groceries, insisting that I take at least one for the moment and another for the way home. They seem to have formed their own OCTOBER 2015

family in this small apartment, bonded by a common language and the daily grind. They stand around the kitchen, exchanging jokes and helping each other prepare food, doing what they can to achieve a semblance of normalcy.

Despite the support of his New Haven family, Noori is always worried about the tenuous situation with his family back home in Afghanistan. “My family, they’re really under serious threat right now, so it’s very challenging for me to be here,” Noori says. “All of my mind is back home.”

— Semhal Tsegaye is a senior in Timothy Dwight College

15

poem

out fencing new pasture Justine Cefalu

I am tied by a golden ribbon, umbilical cord of late afternoon, to the ground.

The land is a constellation of clapboard houses ringed by purple lupine.

Hedgerows are cracks, threads tracing edges where light blooms, the gold-green, green-gold of a field dotted with sheep.

I am kneeling, my arms around the warm belly of a deep-brown ewe.

I scooped her stillborn lamb, soft-boned, into a box, and now I am milking out her thick cream onto grass, feeding fields.

er paolini

illustration by christoph

16

THE NEW JOURN AL

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

SACAR Translations of “to take” Devon Geyelin

andalucía has fewer words than I do. One of my professors here tells me English has three or four ways of saying anything in Castilian, Spain’s most-spoken Spanish, the one we speak here, in Granada. Some say the ratio’s more like 2-to-1. The comparison gets harder when you think about all the country’s unofficial tongues—Basque, Catalan, Galician—but going by my five-pound Spanish-English dictionary, the limit’s on the Castilian side. Sometimes I like that about Spanish, that there’s less of it. Madura: it means both ripe and mature, and I like how the word cups all the touchable time, from beginning until the start of decay.

But I’m living in a university city where it took my friend Anabel a five-minute walk to think of more than three ways to say she had sex. First: foyar, to fuck, which young people use. Then the formal ways—tener sexo, tener relaciones sexuales, practicar sexo—which they don’t. Acostarse con, to sleep with, for an in-between.

And a few minutes later we had me lo tiré, or me la tiré, depending on the sex of the direct object. That you can say if your friend points someone out in the street.

I fucked him; I fucked her. The direct translation is something about throwing him to yourself.

So that’s six. “We are simple, I guess,” said Anabel.

In America, we do all of those, besides admit to needing practice. But there’s enough vocabulary that I feel like half of my relationships are spent trying to decide how to classify our sex, if only to myself. We banged, screwed, nailed, made love. I tapped, hit, did. Got lucky, got it on, got busy, got down, got laid. Knew, in the biblical sense. Or knew him better last year.

The Spanish verb for taking a photograph is sacar: to take out or remove. You sacar la basura (take out OCTOBER 2015

the trash); sacar dinero (withdraw money); sacar parte del cuerpo (stick out a body part); sacar defectos (show someone the defects). In English, the language is similar—you take a photograph; it is taken. But there’s something about the added out that contributes to the feeling I often have in Granada of reaching for something that isn’t mine to take.

I will be here for five months, and it’s been two and a half weeks now. I’ve had time to walk around with my camera. I’ve been around the Alhambra and the public gardens, with the peacocks; the old Jewish quarter; the white Albaicín. The other day I was following a road that curved along and inside a high school tucked into a hill, in Sacromonte, the sector on the far side of the mountain, where things are more residential.

There were a lot of trees, and it was very quiet, and the gates had been open; but at one point there was a girl who saw me through the window of her classroom and I thought, what made me think I’m entitled to be here?

There is a tourist habit that I’ve noticed, and that I have, of visiting foreign countries and photographing doors, windows, and clotheslines. So European, how the bras are swinging around up there, the lace backlit by the sky. How the doors are colorful, and smaller, and the windows have shutters that people actually open and close. The clotheslines are especially exciting, like an open-air gallery where the artist’s intimacies haven’t even been abstracted. Visually, I like them, and I like the doors, and it’s my instinct—American or human, or personal, I don’t know—to claim what I see and like. I can’t help wanting certain colors or angles or gestures for my personal archives, so I have a small sketchbook, too, that I keep with me, especially if I don’t want to carry around my camera.

17

But it bothers me to see a woman come out of her home and catch me photographing her neighbor’s window, or her cat. Drawing seems better, but I don’t know if it is—better because old people think it’s charming, and that’s validating, maybe; or because laying something down in your own hand automatically denotes a degree of human error. You put yourself into it, you leave something behind. On good days, I decide that’s a compromise—that my drawing something is fair because I’m making something new, that belongs to me as much as it does to the subject I’ve refracted. On bad days, I think maybe it’s worse, that I’m assuming an intimacy that grants me the authority to re-interpret what I don’t understand.

I don’t feel like such a voyeur in America, maybe because there I’m only ever taking what feels like mine.

This land is your land; this land is my land. In some defensible way, I’m only claiming what I already have.

But Spain does not have these songs, or this sentiment.

Or at least she hasn’t shared it with me.

I took a writing class last semester called At Home in America. We read personal essays and narrative nonfiction, all focused on the experience of being an American, in America. My professor quoted Joan Didion, often. “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” Then we would go home and tried to lay verbal claim to what we were trying to see.

But now I am in a city in a country that people have been claiming, hard, for centuries. Conquest, re-conquest, inquisition, exile; centuries of constant inter-kingdom warfare. For a language with a third as many words as I’ve grown up with, Castilian has three words to match my “wall.” Pared, muro, muralla—the last one for the sweeping stone encircling medieval towns. You have to enter through an archway on a walled, uphill road—first turn to the right, so an invader’s right-handed sword swing hits wall. I saw one of these archways in Ronda. I took a picture.

And Granada: the Moors’ last stronghold in all of Spain, she finally gave herself over in 1492, the same year Colón gained Isabel’s consent for the conquest I know best. That was a few miles west, in Santa Fe, a town Fernando built to support Granada’s siege. I understood it all better at Colón’s tomb, in the cathedral at Sevilla. Four courtiers, representing his lifetime’s other four Spanish kingdoms, march in statue, each holding a corner of Colón’s coffin. And Granada, la granada, the pomegranate, the last kingdom left un-Christian: she’s the fruit at the foot of the frontright coffin-bearer, opened and crushed and stabbed 18

through by his cross-topped staff. Pomegranates grow on trees here. When ripe, some open themselves.

At home, at school a year ago, my friend Jake told me he thought it was sad, the way people hooked up with each other and said it didn’t mean anything. That people got drunk and let themselves be public in their looking for intimacy, and everyone was looking for it, but then you woke up in the morning and nothing was there. I said maybe, not always. A lot of the time people just want that feeling of being wanted for a little. The two are not the same, always.

The other night a guy was walking me home, to the Spanish dorm I was staying at before I moved in with my host family. I started talking to him about a book I had almost packed but didn’t, because there wasn’t space. It’s called I Want to Show You More. I bought it on Amazon a while ago. From what I remember, it’s stories, I think about sex, written by a woman. I trailed off, though, when describing it, because I realized the only reason I was bringing it up was that I felt that way then, like there was more I wanted to show him, and I didn’t think I knew him well enough to tell him I wanted him to know me better.

IT’S ATTRACTION, AND INTIMACY, MAYBE; THE WORD LOADED COMES TO MIND, AS DOES POTENT, OR RIPE, THOUGH NOT MATURE Show is only half right. It’s a mixture of wanting to give, like give of myself, and show, and share. Express sounds like it should work, but it doesn’t. The word might be reveal, and in a question. How much do you want to see?

In Spanish, conquistar is the verb with which you win someone’s love. There are others—enamorarse con, amelcocharse, encampanarse (this one I like: it also means to become complicated, get difficult)—but conquistar is the one you can do to someone. In my dictionary from 1989, conquistador translates to three things: conqueror; conquering, in adjective form; and lady-killer. [And I found one more word for sex: encamarse con—to sleep with someone, though without the con it means instead to fall ill or to be beaten down, like wheat, under wind or rain.

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illustration by devon geyelin & ivy sanders-schneider

I have no problem saying a Spanish-dubbed 50 Sombras de Grey turned me on last night—though my learned vocabulary hadn’t yet covered “vaginal fisting”—but I don’t want to be conquered, or someone’s conquest, or even claimed, I don’t think. I don’t have the right language for the thing I’ve been feeling lately. It’s attraction, and intimacy, maybe; the word loaded comes to mind, as does potent, or ripe, though not mature. I understand it mostly as this strange desire to purge. Can I give you my writing? My drawing? My talking? Is it bringing you closer? This weekend there were so many things I had to keep myself from texting him. Thirty-four is Paloma’s lucky number, too. The colors in Ronda OCTOBER 2015

are incredible. Are you free tomorrow? I landed on what Simon from Belgium told me in the hostel in Sevilla: During the marathon of Marrakesh they give the runners oranges and dates at the checkpoints. Last night I got home and wrote down that I felt like a bowl of grapes. What does that mean? Purple and wet, and also dry? Tart, suede-skinned? Pluckable?

I don’t know, but now I’m touching my collarbone, and the question is how much he wants to see, and whether that will be more or less in an hour. How much of myself can I give to you? How much will you take?

— Devon Geyelin is a senior in Trumbull College 19

feb 11

jan 28

jan 14

dec 10

dec 03

nov 11

Multicultural Lecture Students from u.s. Health Justice Course

the silent curriculum

Terrence Holt, md Assistant Professor, Social Medicine, Division of Geriatric Medicine University of North Carolina School of Medicine

Dillard Lecture

internal medicine

Cyra Levenson Curator of Education, Yale Center for British Art

Barwick Lecture

learning to see drawing as thinking

Ilene Y. Wong, md Urologist Author (as i.w. Gregorio), None of the Above location Cohen Auditorium, Child Study Center nihb, e-02 230 South Frontage Road 5:00–6:30pm

Cosponsored by the Program for Biomedical Ethics

has medicine failed the intersex community (and could literature save it)?

Lisa Rosenbaum, md Cardiologist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; National Correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine

writing the medical experience

Amy Hungerford Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University Please note: November 11 is a Wednesday.

James Kenney Lecture

what the humanities know

s piro l e cture s e rie s

2015–2016 The Program for

Humanities in Medicine

5pm–6pm, Beaumont Room Yale University School of Medicine 333 Cedar Street, New Haven

Talks are free and open to the public.

The Richard Selzer Lecture

marguerite rush lerner creative writing contest winners

Thomas P. Duffy, md Professor of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine

Barwick Lecture

learning to see portraits of illness and the call of the other

Tara Geer Artist Instructor of Drawing Teachers College, Columbia University; Associate Adjunct, Professor of Art Columbia College

Barwick Lecture

learning to see assumptions in observation

Laura Ferguson Artist in Residence, Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine nyu School of Medicine

Barwick Lecture

learning to see cadaver portraits

Christian Wiman Author, Editor, Translator; Senior Lecturer, Religion and Literature Yale Divinity School

Dobihal Lecture

my bright abyss

Titus Kaphar Artist

Barwick Lecture

learning to see the jerome project

Yale school of medicine

may 05

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mar 03

feb 25

Students from u.s. Health Justice Course

Twitter @YaleMedHum www.facebook.com / YaleHumanitiesinMedicine Contact Karen.Kolb@yale.edu to join our listserv

Director: Anna Reisman, md

CRITICAL ANGLE

THE BRIGHTEST AMONG US The wiring of the tenure track Ceri Godinez

disneyland “is the real country presented as imaginary to make us think other things are real,” says J.D. Connor, an assistant professor in the History of Art Department at the close of a lecture in his course on Disney. “But the real is no longer real.”

“Mind blown,” the student next to me whispers.

As usual, when J. D. Connor speaks about film, he leaves me feeling that if I listened hard enough, I, too, could use the clues in pop culture to unlock the invisible workings of the universe.

Professor Connor has been my faculty advisor, my tour guide through both America’s most iconic media corporation and, in a class dedicated to the JFK assassination, the real-life political thriller that’s been an American obsession for the past fifty years. More than 2,600 Yale graduate and professional students voted him to be one of the humanities lecturers at the 2015 Inspiring Yale event; more than two hundred students enrolled in his course on Disney this semester. But despite his popularity and gift for teaching, Yale has decided to let J. D. Connor go.

Last spring, when professor Connor informed me that he was up for promotion and would be on leave next year if all went well, I worried that I would be without an advisor for my junior year. Any other possible outcome never occurred to me. Until he was denied promotion from assistant professor to “associate on term,” the tenure track was something to which I had given little thought. When I admit this to Tamar Gendler, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, she tells me that, too, is a part of the tenure process: “There’s no reason [students] should have to know how the walls are wired. They just want the lights to be bright.”

But suddenly, a bulb was out, and I wanted to know why. I tried my best to perform diagnostics. I knew it wasn’t the bulb itself, because Connor was one of the best teachers I’d ever had. Instead, I turned my attention to the wiring, which I did not understand at all.

22

illustrations by ivy sanders-schneider

THE NEW JOURN AL

won me over, rather than the promise of glimpsing a handful of Nobel laureates. Or maybe that’s how I preferred to frame my priorities to myself when I came to Yale as a freshman. Regardless, I am left with the suspicion that I didn’t fully grasp the terms and conditions before clicking the “agree” button.

In which I learn a bit about electrical wiring

Professor Amy Hungerford, who chairs the Tenure and Promotions Committee for the humanities, walked me through the three criteria that form the basis for decisions on tenure—research, teaching, and service.

It is difficult for faculty to receive tenure if their teaching is poor and shows no signs of improvement, she explained. It is equally difficult when the teaching is superb but the scholarship is borderline. A weak publishing record is particularly lethal, in line with the adage, “publish or perish.”

“Research will always be the emphasis of Yale,” said Kathryn Lofton, a tenured faculty member who serves on the committee currently reviewing the tenure system implemented in 2007. The committee is set to publish its findings in 2017, and every ten years thereafter. Lofton, a professor of religious studies, has a nose ring and a tattoo: she is hardly the image of an educational system entrenched in conservative ideals.

I struggled to reconcile her words with her appearance and friendly demeanor.

I wanted teaching to carry more weight and felt compelled to blame my misconceptions about Yale’s teaching emphasis on something concrete, so I settled on its promotional materials. I went back and watched “That’s Why I Chose Yale”—the giant hallmark card from the Admissions Office to prospective students.

The video opens with a tour guide fielding questions at an info session. A young woman in the front row asks, “Is it true that all Yale professors teach?” The tour guide replies, “It is true that every tenured professor in Yale College teaches undergraduates…” I thought the tour guide would finish his sentence with something like “which shows the care and thought Yale puts into the classroom experience of its students.” He did not. Instead, the sentence ends, “… so even a freshman might be taking a class from a Nobel Prize winner.”

The guide was implying that prestige or, at least, prestige by proxy, is what we’re getting at Yale. This is not what I thought I was getting when I came to Yale.

Perhaps it’s because the University’s message about low faculty-to-student ratios and small class sizes is what OCTOBER 2015

In which I learn that this is not the original wiring

It turns out, there are worse things than the current tenure system. Before 2007, Yale’s tenure system was a far uglier beast than the one that dictates hiring practices today. At that time, junior faculty were hired without the guarantee of being considered for tenure.

Untenured ladder faculty could not remain at Yale for more than ten years, so if the ten years passed and the department failed to find room in its budget to hire a tenured professor, the faculty member would be forced to leave. If a department did have the resources to make a permanent faculty hire, it typically conducted a nationwide search to fill the newly available senior position. Preference was not given to the junior faculty already at Yale.

YOU CAN’T DEVELOP CLOSE FRIENDSHIPS BECAUSE THEY GET SWALLOWED UP BY THE FOG MACHINE I came to understand the pre-2007 system as a ten-year post-doc. Though Yale could not guarantee junior faculty job security, it could offer its untenured faculty worldclass resources, and, more importantly, the Yale seal of approval on any published material. Gambling ten years of your life on a nineteen percent chance at tenure, however, seemed a high price to pay for prestige.

23

At the very least, the new system provides a clearer path toward consideration for tenure, though Lofton stated that the University does not keep data on likelihood of tenure, so it is difficult to compare. To me, the reorganization seems by no means satisfactory for all.

“It’s like The Hunger Games,” said a recently tenured faculty member, who I will call X as he asked not to be named. It is a good illustration of the contentiousness of this issue that out of the thirty professors I asked about tenure at Yale, almost all either declined to be interviewed or chose the safety of anonymity.

“You can’t develop close friendships because they get swallowed up by the fog machine,” X said. By then end of the tenure process, faculty members have watched a good portion of their colleagues leave. When, or if, they make it through the process, at least some—the X’s of the University—have developed survivor’s guilt.

I know that I am not the first person to reach the conclusion that Yale is something less than paradise for the untenured faculty member. This past year, there have been several voluntary departures in departments such as Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies, amid criticism of Yale’s institutional culture and hiring practices, including the tenure process. While some people, like J. D. Connor, wait to find out that they will be asked to leave, others go willingly to places like Columbia, Cornell, the University of Chicago, places where the tenure process is sometimes almost halved from Yale’s nine-year process to just five years.

In which I watch the electrician work with my eyes closed

The document given to newly hired faculty at Yale outlining the tenure process is beautifully laminated. I receive this exact shiny piece of paper in plastic from Gendler. I have the urge to run it under water. At this point in my interviews on the subject of tenure, I have heard so much about this chart that it feels like I’m meeting a celebrity. At the top of the page is a small, colorful chart, which depicts the steps of the post-2007 tenure system in chronological order. “The fact that 24

this chart even exists is an incredible achievement,” Lofton had told me at our earlier meeting.

I peruse the picture at my leisure, tracing the process from hiring, as a first year associate professor, to the final committee review for tenure. It’s a story told in acronyms and italics: the road many of our professors are on, but which few of us understand as we listen to their lectures and speak with them during office hours or in seminars.

YALE IS A PLACE IN WHICH THE WIRING IS NOT IDEAL, BUT THE LIGHTING IS FLATTERING Junior faculty members at Yale are hired as assistant professors. After leaping over a few comparatively lower hurdles during their first six years, they come up for promotion to associate professor with tenure or full professor (depending on their department) in their eighth year.

If the candidate passes an internal departmental review, the department puts together an application that it brings before the Tenure and Promotions Committee for the candidate’s general area of study: humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, or physical sciences and engineering. Unlike tenure review at many other universities, the committee is comprised of senior faculty members, rather than administrators. The application consists of one hundred pages of the applicant’s work and a minimum of seven letters of review from faculty in the same area of research at peer institutions. Gendler reads all of the professor’s end-of-semester teaching evaluations and builds a report on the candidate’s teaching abilities to present to the group.

The members of TAPC vote by secret ballot. In order to receive promotion, the applicant needs a majority.

The content of the discussion is never disclosed to the candidate. But the final outcome is simple and irrevocable as best I can tell from the chart: “A candidate for appointment or promotion to a tenure position, whether at the rank of professor or associate professor, must have attained scholarly or creative distinction of high quality as demonstrated by both research and teaching. Consideration for tenure emphasizes the impact and continuing THE NEW JOURN AL

promise, at the very highest levels, of the candidate’s research and scholarship, as well as excellent teaching and engaged University citizenship within and beyond a department or program […] Tenured faculty at Yale are expected to stand among the foremost in their fields in the world.”

As a student, that is exactly the kind of person I want teaching all of my classes. But for faculty, “there is a general vagueness about the criteria for tenure,” as X tells me. “It is unclear whether two books is enough [in the humanities and social sciences], though some people receive tenure having published only one book.”

The nebulous nature of the criteria causes anxiety.

“Research, teaching, service—to excel at the highest level in all three is virtually impossible,” says Charles Musser, a tenured professor of film and media studies. “If they wanted to shoot you down, they can always find a category. At least, that was the feeling that was shared by my cohort group of junior faculty as we faced the tenure process.” Though the intricate process could not be described as arbitrary, student spectators and faculty climbing the ladder are left in the dark at decision time.

X reiterated what Lofton had told me—scholarship is what matters; teaching and service to the University don’t count as much. It would be easy to blame this on academia more broadly, except this is not the case at all top-tier universities. At Cornell, for instance, where X studied, students are asked to write letters of evaluation when professors came up for tenure.

“THERE’S NO REASON [STUDENTS] SHOULD HAVE TO KNOW HOW THE WALLS ARE WIRED. THEY JUST WANT THE LIGHTS TO BE BRIGHT.”

— TAMAR GENDLER DEAN OF THE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES OCTOBER 2015

In which I realize that meritocracy and democracy are not the same type of light fixture

When Gendler introduced the lighting analogy to me, she told me that she was curious why a student wanted to learn the wiring at all. I said that I didn’t think most undergraduates had a grasp on how the system worked. Like me, they got upset when they lost a faculty member who had made a difference in their academic career. Most, however, had little idea as to what had led to a beloved teacher’s release.

Generally, we aren’t keeping tabs on who has tenure and who is awaiting it. “It’s great news that undergraduates are not worried about who’s in what role—that means we are hiring great faculty across the board,” Gendler told me, adding that students were often not sensitive to the “formal University academic role of the faculty whom they learn from.”

I thought back to J. D. Connor’s revelatory lectures and felt scorned because his apparent popularity among students appeared to have little to no effect in dictating his reception by the Yale tenure machine. It felt like I had entered some kind of dystopian novel where the paternalistic government was hiding things from its citizens to keep them content. Where was my ability to effect change? Had I ever had that ability? From Lofton, I knew the current review committee was working hard to find a way to better evaluate teaching in the tenure process and to make the entire process more 25

transparent, but I felt that these changes were promises designed to appease. By that point, people like Connor would already have left for other universities.

It took a conversation with a professor studying labor history to calm me down. Michael Denning, the current DUS of American Studies, has been at Yale since the 1980s, and has observed the tenure process through its multiple iterations. He said that in the last thirty years, the essence has hardly changed.

“The ethos back then—I’ll put it on the positive side, which is their way of seeing it—[was] to get tenure you must be one of the leading people in your field. This maintains Yale’s rhetoric of excellence. You wouldn’t be here as a student if not for that.” My immediate impulse, as a student, was to refute this statement. I am not a selfish person.

I opened my mouth to interrupt, but was silenced by his next words: “At a democratic institution, it would be important to understand the wiring. However, Yale is far from a democratic higher-education institution.”

I had thought the tenure system was broken. But the problem wasn’t the system; I had made a labeling error in the lighting department.

In which I find myself at the light switch

I was disappointed. Disappointed because it was my mistake, not theirs. Disappointed because Yale was not more like Disneyland. Disappointed because, more than anything, I felt incredibly relieved—I had been let off the hook.

Yale is a place in which the wiring is not ideal, but the lighting is flattering. Though the system is far from humane for faculty, the research-focused rigor of the tenure system contributes heavily to Yale’s claim as one of the world’s leading academic institutions. As students, there is real economic value in being able to claim this name brand as our own. At the same time, we benefit from a cycle of imaginative classes taught by new, energetic professors striving for tenure. Under the current tenure system, though great teaching and great renown may not go hand in hand, they are not mutually exclusive. But ultimately, the wiring isn’t our concern as students. We can see the lights, so we know the system’s working fine. And the self-loathing of being another conductive element in the great mass of wires will wear off by the start of the next semester.

— Ceri Godinez is a junior in Calhoun College

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poem

old asphalt schoolyard Ruby Bilger

Waits near a pile of kids, anyway, “who keeps putting lizards in Polly Pocket clothes?” the problem is considered as they bat at their hair to keep the breeze from affecting them. Outside the bell tolls. Something may be happening, or the feeling of it—hard to remember until it’s happening again.

In the mean time the kids must wonder what to call themselves, the niggling prettiness of luck or deadpan charity, what glimpses live inside them and why they won’t develop or why they never seem to stop waving at the great sheaves of preoccupied people, who spill out of doorways to swell with the promise of their fullness and the daily gab, and hey, sorry, can’t talk right now, I have to go to secret class.

illustration by carly lovejoy

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What’s Left Behind

30

illustrations by edward wang

THE NEW JOURN AL

Story & photos by Sebi Medina-Tayac

The Mexican town of Tetlanohcan grapples with New Haven’s OCTOBER 2015

“get in, guero [white boy], it’s cold out here,” said Daniel Mendieta, naked in the mountain air. He leaned out of the temazcal built at the edge of the cornfield.

The sweat lodge, bathed in crisp moonlight, had been in the family’s backyard for generations—it was the site of their monthly purification steam baths. I undressed, placed my clothes on a dusty wooden chair, and crawled into the candlelit opening.

Inside, Daniel threw a shallow bowl of water into the black hole of an antechamber in the corner of the lodge.

The charred wooden logs within released a sooty vapor. It pulled on my skin with a familiar wet heat. My community, the Piscataway Indian Nation in Maryland, has a similar purification practice. This guero was an infiltrado—an undercover Indian.

“In the old days, only the gods were allowed to bathe in the temazcal,” Daniel said, kneeling next to me. “Now we are allowed.” Since European contact, the gods of this remote town in the highlands of Tlaxcala, Mexico, are composites: traditional figures like the mother goddess Tonantizin have been syncretized with Catholic saints, such as La Virgen de Guadalupe. Principal in the town of San Francisco Tetlanohcan is, of course, the beloved patron San Francisco de Asis, who dwells in the parochial church in the central square, a ten-minute walk from the Mendieta house.

A temazcal crouched behind most of the houses I visited in the farming town in Mexico’s smallest state, Tlaxcala. Though it was one of the first footholds of Catholicism in the country, the state preserved many of its older rituals. People like Daniel, a 21-year-old courier for the state government building, have kept the traditions alive.

Nowadays, however, most of the ten thousand residents of Tetlanohcan don’t use their sweat lodges, Daniel explained between heaves of steamy breath. “People get embarrassed to use the temazcal. They think it’s too hick.”

Outside, corn stalks creaked in the cold mountain breeze and the pigs snored. Inside the one-story Mendieta house, where I stayed during my time in Tetlanohcan, the rest of the family filled the house with activity. Daniel’s father, Bernardo, and his youngest brother, Aldo, 18, browsed the Spanish offerings on Netflix; his sister Elena, 23, reheated mole and tortillas; Daniel’s young wife and baby son sat on the ground clapping hands, and his sister Jackie, 19, video-chatted their older brother Francisco— who lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Francisco and his two siblings made the perilous trip North when he was 16 years old. He followed in the footsteps of over a thousand other Tetlanohquences who have come to New Haven since the 1980s. Roughly fifteen percent of the town’s population lives here—some with documentation, some without. Tetlanohcan’s migrants naturally choose a location where they have relatives and 31

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friends, who offer job opportunities and a social network.

Now, the remittances from Francisco’s job at a restaurant in Orange, Connecticut, pay for the screen that allows him to talk to his sister. They pay for his siblings’ education and some of their food. They also subsidize his father’s traditional campesino lifestyle in a globalizing economy stacked against small-town farmers, especially those in largely indigenous communities.

New Haven’s Mexican population is a huge presence in the city. Traditional music plays on the streets in Fair Haven and the Hill, Mexican-run businesses dominate the neighborhoods, and the immigrant communities influence the city’s political landscape. Tetlanohcan is the town that shows most acutely what has happened to the places they have left behind. While people have streamed in from other cities in Tlaxcala and the neighboring metropolis of Puebla, from no other town has New Haven lured a comparably significant fraction.

The money that migrants wire home is a complex force—it separates families and ushers in a corrosive American consumerism, all the while propping up Tetlanohcan’s traditional practices and allowing the town to survive economic shifts. For the young Mendietas, this contradiction is just normal life in Tetlanohcan, as they and others who have tilled the land for millennia work to hold their lost brothers and sisters close.

Over the course of the week, Elena Mendieta spreads her clothes in the grass to dry under the sun, draws water from the well to wash the dishes, and makes tortillas by hand from corn grown on her family plot. The crop is notably absent from the bouquet of produce sold at the weekly farmers’ market that takes up the entire central plaza, simply because everyone has a lot of it already.

Corn used to be the main currency in Tetlanohcan, exchanged by the kilo for other goods. Since the market value of the crop has dropped, only the most dedicated farmers get up at dawn every week to barter with corn.

Many just store the corn for themselves or sell it to the government for a few cents per kilo.

The Mendieta siblings grew up in a post-NAFTA world, one formed by the 1994 trade agreement that many say accelerated the destruction of the campesino lifestyle in Mexico and forced a consumer culture on people who had previously been self-reliant. Studies published in the wake of NAFTA showed a sharp drop in domestic corn sales in Mexico as larger buyers switched over to newly subsidized imported U.S. corn, starving rural and indigenous communities across the country. But in Tetlanohcan, Jackie says, there is only Mexican corn—blue, white, yellow, and sweet. “Why would we import our corn?” she laughs, bewildered, shaking a tall corn out of the sea of swaying stalks.

OCTOBER 2015

“When I was a little girl, I used to run through the corn stalks and feel the leaves tickle my face,” she said. “They grab your clothes a bit, and it feels funny.”

Corn is no longer profitable, so many Tetlanoquences start family side businesses to support their farms—flooring is the region’s most popular trade. And families rely on remittances sent home by relatives in the U.S. The money puts TVs and cable in the humble concrete-floored living rooms; it sends siblings to school and university; it makes sure families have better clothes and three meals a day.

“We used to only eat two meals a day, just something very small, beans and tortillas. Not a lot but that’s how it was,” said Francisca Rosette, gesturing toward her courtyard in a disjointed low-ceilinged house. “We never used to have houses like this. Now [some people] are even building two-story houses here.”

The workers in New Haven, who may never return to their Tetlanohcan, are a spectral force in their hometown.

Their vacated homes, ostentatious for the town but still smaller than the average house in the Connecticut suburbs, often remain unoccupied. These dwellings represent the promise of homecoming that can take decades to realize, and the money that goes towards expanding each home sometimes fails to arrive. By the polluted pond on a foothill of La Malintzin, the construction of a huge neoclassical concrete mansion was put on hold when the owner was laid off his construction job in New York.

Young men now steal and resell bricks from the unstable shell of his palace.

Back in Jackie’s yard, she tells me about the social issues that come with the imported cash. Unemployment remains high, as does crime. Corn is no longer just the staple of agricultural life. “At night, the corn makes me nervous because robbers hide between the stalks along the road.” She pointed with her lips at a dilapidated shack in a cornfield by her house. Dogs wrestled in the front and two men in tank tops stared at something far beyond us.

“Those are thieves,” she said.

The men and others like them illustrate the great social risk associated with leaving one’s children behind, even with the objective of providing for them from afar. Lucia Rosette, another woman in Tetlanohcan, explained the problem this way: with their own children and other responsibilities to care for, relatives can’t always provide the same care as a child’s parents, so generations of youth grow up unsupervised. She sees too many tired abuelos and too many of their grandchildren joining gangs, committing violence in the town, and becoming alcoholics, potheads, or drug addicts—several women interviewed corroborated the social shift anecdotally. Over chipping murals and political ads, “La Mafia” is tagged in bright orange on many prominent walls.

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On my way into the town for the first time, a thin, tattooed man in his early twenties got on a crowded convi (rural transport) and turned on a tape player with a melancholy hip hop beat. He freestyle rapped in absent monotone about his effort to make a living without being on the streets. He ended by thanking everyone on the transport and holding out his hand for donations.

It’s the same convi Jackie now takes every day to commute to Tlaxcala University, where her classes are paid for by her brother in New Haven.

While Jackie’s path forward has allowed her to stay close to home, her brothers’ and sister’s plans took them thousands of miles away. During my visit, the Mendieta clan walked together to weddings and the weekly market, dinner parties and the bus stop. Bernardo extended a rough hand into his cousin’s pickup, and waved to an aunt sitting on her porch. Every aspect of Tetlanohcan society is arranged around extended family, but everyone seems to be missing a lot of it. The missing Mendietas and their young children have been pictures on the wall for over a decade.

“I haven’t seen my son in eleven years,” Bernardo Mendieta said with an uncharacteristic tremble in his voice. “It’s a long time, a very long time.”

His children are unable to visit because they are worried they won’t be able to get back into the U.S. Bernardo himself was caught by the border patrol while trying to cross into California in the early 1990s. They took his fingerprints and deported him. He made it into the country on his second attempt, but he worked in the states for only a few months before returning to Tetlanohcan voluntarily. Decades later, this ink on his record, which many men and women in the community have, keeps him from getting a visa to visit.

People in the town send their family members goods in the mail to remind them what home is like: traditional foods, herbal medicine, and carnival regalia all travel to New Haven for events like the San Francisco carnival, a continuation of a pre-Hispanic tradition recreated in a parking lot by the Mill River. One shipping storefront stands between a dirt road by a cornfield in Mexico, and another between my house on Elm Street and Stop and Shop. But mail is not enough.

In order to cope with the seemingly universal experience of family separation in the town, Tetlanohcan women organized into a support group called the Indigenous Migrant Family Resource Center (CAFAMI), which acknowledges their indigenous heritage as part of their larger project to reclaim the town’s traditional culture. Marco Castillo, an indigenous social anthropologist from Puebla, helped form the group in the early 2000s. Benjamin Cuapio, a gruff farmer who lived in 34

New Haven for over a decade, donated a house for CAFAMI to use about ten years ago. It sits in the shadow of La Malintzin, a titanic dormant volcano that presides over the entire valley of Tlaxcala.

At the house, a fluctuating group of roughly fifty women meets weekly to talk about the absence of family, participate in workshops on feminism (previously an unfamiliar concept in the town, they said), and practice traditional songs in Nahuatl. But there’s a decidedly pragmatic edge to their work: they have turned their personal stories of the migrant family experience, mixed with traditional song and dance, into a performance to be staged far beyond Tetlanohcan. The goal is not only to showcase traditional culture, but also to secure tickets to the U.S. with the help of sponsoring educational institutions and grassroots organizations. Threatened by American cultural influence and the town’s gradual population loss, these indigenous practices allowed them to temporarily visit their estranged relatives in the U.S. and to see the lives those families had built for themselves.

Between 2008 and 2012, CAFAMI traveled to New York and New Haven three times to perform in theaters at Yale and in Fair Haven. Audiences watched “La Casa Rosa,” a musical in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl recounting one family’s experience through the pain and complexity of migration. But the real drama occurred hours before, off stage, as the actors reunited with their siblings, parents, and children, who many hadn’t seen in over a decade.

When I was there with my brother Francisco, I was reminded of something very old, a part of me I hadn’t felt in a very long time,” Jackie said. “I still always, always miss that feeling.”

CAFAMI’s project, however, began to slow in recent years. Some attribute it to personal divisions between the women. Others say the group was hurt by Castillo’s departure to Mexico City to run the Migrant Families’ Popular Assembly (APOFAM), an organization that uses the Tetlanohcan model to revitalize traditional cultures and find alternative ways to visit relatives in the U.S, as access to visas remains difficult.

But the absence of CAFAMI’s support has not stopped people like Jackie from thinking of how to make moves.

She is impatient to see her brothers and sister again and is hustling to make it happen. Her half-formed plans for reorganizing the women and finding a way to get back to the U.S. include applying for a startup grant and exporting traditional candies or indigenous herbal medicines to New Haven, so they could travel on a business visa.

In the meantime, families make do with long-distance contact. Calling cards are quickly becoming an artifact as migrant communities add Facebook, FaceTime, and Skype to their toolkit, keeping their bridges THE NEW JOURN AL

Jackie, Elena, and Aldo Mendieta walk to an aunt’s birthday party. over the tall border fence. In my research for this article, I coordinated with the Mendietas, my contacts at the Migrant Families Popular Assembly in Mexico City, and countless sources in both Tetlanohcan and New Haven through Facebook messenger. With dicey cell service, even the older folks are picking up on their children’s technologies to stay in touch.

When I asked him about the impact of technology on Tetlanohcan, Bernardo said, “You mean this sickness?”

His rough hands hit his daughter’s cracked LG smartphone touch screen. “Well, it helps. I can see my children’s faces.”

Other families are luckier than the Mendietas. Migrants with legal residence in the U.S., like Oscar De La Rosa, who has lived in New Haven for twenty-five years, allowed me to tag along with him on his visit home. De La Rosa traveled to New Haven from San Pedro Muñoztla, Tetlanohcan’s closest neighbor, in 1990, following his brother-in-law. Another relative had died on the trip north, so they went carefully. After working a variety of manual jobs, he was able to build his flooring business to a five-man crew. But since the recession in 2008, he’s been running the show himself. Things aren’t easy but he makes enough to visit his family back in Tlaxcala a few times a year—on this trip he was looking to invest in a relative’s business in San Pedro. The power was out at the OCTOBER 2015

festival he took me to, so the vendors flashed LED lights to attract customers like moths. He ordered a pitcher of pulke, the region’s special fermentation of mague—a succulent resembling a giant pineapple that grows by the side of roads—with the consistency of saliva.

“This is my home,” he said. “I have to come back every once in awhile to see my family and taste the air.” And the pulke. There’s no pulke in New Haven.

A two-liter bottle of soda, usually Coca-Cola, was placed on every dining table at every meal in Tetlanohcan that I visited. Mexico’s soda consumption is ranked fourth in the world, according to a Euromonitor study, and has risen over sixty percent since 1989. Jackie is the only person I met who didn’t touch it, despite relatives’ and friends’ repeated insistence.

“No, thank you so, so much, auntie, but I don’t drink soda, remember?” she apologized. She avoids it to stay healthy, but it’s hard to refuse gifts in Tetlanohcan.

As American products are making the reverse journey back to Tetlanochan in droves, Tetlanohcan youth navigate the apparent contradiction between the traditional life of their parents and the consumer culture imported from their siblings and relatives working in the U.S. As I walked home with Jackie, her 18-year-old brother Aldo glanced up from the stone basin in front of the house 35

where he was furiously scrubbing something. He grunted an introduction, then excitedly drew his gleaming white pair of Puma sneakers from the basin, looking at the American city kid for an appraisal.

“They look American, for real, right?” he asked.

“Definitely,” I said, becoming the sneaker expert he needed. “I can see the stitching.”

“Yup. That’s because they are American—authentic!” he said. “My brother sent them straight from Conneteecuh.”

Inside, the hallway is cluttered with two broken speaker sets. They sleep two to a bed on worn mattresses with uneven springs.

The next day, Jackie and Elena took me to the nearest city, Santa Ana Chiautempan, for its annual fair. We rushed through the obligatory historical exhibit leading the fairgrounds, featuring toy dioramas of Tlaxcala’s history. The mismatched “Indian” figurines were bare-chested and peeling. The exhibit ended with a towering effigy of Jesus on the cross. This display even had fresh blood dripping onto a sheet.

We walked into the gauntlet of neon lights and cotton candy. American electronic music, circa 2012, blared across the rows of shops and stalls—Bob Marley T-shirts, traditional Tlaxcalteca stoneware, fake jewelry (“no photos!”), beaded necklaces, Jesus paraphernalia. Tlaxcaltecas from throughout the valley mobbed the rickety rides, children screaming and sprinting the length of the whirling machines. Jackie and Elena picked La Himalaya, a rusted spoke that spun passengers in three-seated cars, each decorated with a freakish, spray-painted caricature of a different U.S. pop star. It’s a miracle Michael Jackson held together for as long as he did.

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Tlaxcala’s eponymous capital city has a fair three times the size, they boast. Among all this gaudy foreign paraphernalia, the people of the state have permanently placed another figure at the center of the city: the statue of the great Tlaxcalteca warrior Xicohténcatl, known endearingly as “El Xico” (pronounced el SHEE-ko), for which the capital is officially named: Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl. The ruler of the state of Tlaxcallan at the time of Spanish arrival, Xicohténcatl is most famous for intercepting and defeating Cortes’s troops and forcing them into a peace treaty. They then formed an alliance and successfully invaded Tenochtitlan, which is now called Mexico City, the capital of their Aztec rivals. But Cortes, as European invaders so often did, accused El Xico of treason and hung him.

Though Mexicans from other states tease Tlaxcaltecas, calling them “traitors” because their ancestors marched with Cortes, El Xico is an indigenous freedom fighter in Tlaxcala.

He is martyred for defying both the Aztec and the Spanish to save his kingdom. Indeed, Tlaxcaltecas were spared many of the horrors that other indigenous Mexicans faced at the hands of the European invaders, maintaining a degree of sovereignty through Mexico’s early history.

I stood staring at El Xico for a long time. This chiseled indigenous masculine hero reminded me of one of Louis Hall’s militant American Indian Movement propaganda figures, which I grew up around, often depicting a Mohawk Übermensch with his back to the rising sun. But in Tlaxcala, the statue and the indigenous resistance it represents is not radical; it is totally normalized—kids climb on his benevolent toes while vendors sell their parents bubble wands. Indigeneity is an omnipresent, though changing, force in Tlaxcala.

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At the Mendieta household, this back-and-forth between cultures takes place in their grandmother’s kitchen, where people speak a mix of Nahuatl and Spanish. They call it “speaking Mexican.” As we ate chiles enogadas (a fried sweet stuffed pepper) Jackie, who learned Nahuatl at home and at school, was teasing my colonized tongue at the kids’ table.

“Pa-no-tzi-no,” she sounded out. “That means good day, Sebi.”

“Here, I’ll help you, guero,” her cousin’s boyfriend poked at me. “Pah-not-SHEE-noh bro,” he said in his best Sean Connery impression. I’d been hearing it all day.

“Stop fucking with me,” I snapped back, only half joking. “No me chingues.”

Bernardo had sat me down and taught me how to curse in Spanish, worried I wouldn’t survive the family if I couldn’t defend myself.

“How do you say that in Nahuatl, abuelita?” Jackie asked.

“Chingaduria,” she obliged. Bernardo roared and smacked the table.

one that leads people to ask what would happen if they left for good. Her brother Daniel is certainly thinking about it. But for Jackie, there’s still a future here in Tetlanohcan—one that in many ways depends on New Haven.

—Sebi Medina-Tayac is a senior in Davenport College

*Reporting from this story originally appeared in a series in the New Haven Independent.

Jackie is set on making it back to New Haven to visit her brothers.

In the family’s cramped kitchen, she broke her situation down for me while preparing lunch: pipian, a creamy stew made from sesame seeds, nopal cactus, potatoes, and lots of chiles.

She stared down at the sesame seeds toasting in a dry pan, nutty and papery in the thin mountain air, and explained that CAFAMI, which she and many others quit in recent years, isn’t the only way to get a visa to the U.S. “It’s just a matter of getting things moving again,” she said. “We have to get the women back together and find something.”

Jackie sliced the nopal cactus paddles with a hunting knife as if they were sticks of butter. The chipotle peppers were boiling. “Well, the other thing about all this is I’m going to university soon, and that puts a sort of hold on my ambitions.” In a way, the life enabled by her brother’s remittances will, for the time being, keep them apart.

She started to fry the nopales and potatoes, throwing them around the old skillet with a wooden spoon. Then she carefully poured the hot sesame seeds, chipotles, cinnamon sticks, and cloves into a blender. “I just would like to visit the United States, spend time with my brothers and sister.” The ground spices piled on top of the nopales and potatoes, where they quickly simmered into a light pink broth, alongside a stack of tortillas handmade with corn from the family plot. She tipped back her pink Hollister cap to wipe the sweat from her brow.

At dinner, Jackie calls her brother Francisco from her smartphone. For Francisco and other migrants, the only way forward was north. There’s a restlessness to the town, OCTOBER 2015

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ENDNOTE

THE CASE OF THE MISSING ADIRONDACKS You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s lawn

illustration

by christop

her paolini

Olivia Klevorn

it is cold more often than it is warm in the courtyard of Silliman College. A rectangular plot of grass divided by stone paths and lined on four sides by Georgian, French Renaissance, and Gothic residential buildings, it is a house-and-field setup. It’s a function of the college’s expansive structure, dating from a time when people believed that sod and sun would make you moral. Last year, seventeen Adirondack chairs (eight in chili pepper red and nine in chili pepper green) were placed in the courtyard. But recently, the chairs have started to go missing. At press time, seven remain. SG, the Silliman operations manager, says it has become a problem, which has made the community start asking the necessary questions. Not “who would want to steal these fucking plastic Adirondack chairs?” But “why are they here in the first place?” i The chairs are designed to accommodate the posture of a reclining middle-aged man. This might be because they were designed by one. The Adirondack chair was invented for use exclusively as a piece of summer home furniture. Though Adirondack chairs were initially made of wood, Silliman’s are of a thick, high quality, lightweight plastic. As a result, they are good conductors of heat in warm weather and can become hazardous to sit in. Regardless, it is cold more than it is warm in the Silliman Courtyard, and there are no summer homes here. The chairs are an example of what may be called an “Institution,” what Professor Elijah Anderson describes in lecture on Wednesday afternoon as “An established way of doing something that effectively outlives its biological inheritance. The way of life persists, and the people involved in it die off and disappear.”

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ii There is a rumor around Silliman that people have been using the Adirondack chairs for “pants-on sex,” and that the administration removed them in a fit of moral fervor and is now just pretending that the chairs are missing, so that no one will know how afraid of sex the administration really is. The rumor is widely considered untenable, because SG keeps hemorrhaging daily email reminders about the social contract: “Things that are intended to be used in common are not intended for private use.” Presumably he wouldn’t do this if the administration were thieving the chairs.

The girl I used to live with, who sometimes ate pizza and drank brandy in the Adirondack chairs while waiting for her rugby man to come home, says she “would do it, no, has done it in the hammock, but never, never in an Adirondack chair.” All of this seems to refute the rumored use of the Adirondack chairs. iii C works in the Silliman dining hall, has worked there for 15+ years, and does not plan on leaving any time THE NEW JOURN AL

soon. Her job is standing at the dining hall’s entrance, running ID cards through a scanner, and sliding a damp rag over tables between meals. C believes the chairs are disappearing because “kids have been drinking,” but does not view their absence as significant. She focuses on the fact that she has “more than most people I know:” a courtyard to walk across and a job on the other side. C is missing a toe and stands all day. iv Benjamin Silliman was Yale’s first science professor.

He gave the campus some laws of the universe and lent his name to a college built by the Vanderbilt family.

Benjamin Silliman collected meteors. As far as I can tell, a meteor is just a really big rock. It is only a meteor because it came to us from space. Although it is hard for us to say precisely where space begins or ends, it was even harder for Benjamin Silliman. When Benjamin Silliman wanted to look at his meteor, he probably took it out of its protective case, held it up to his eyeball, and marveled at holding something of the universe in his palm. To examine it more carefully, he may have had to sit in something like an Adirondack chair. Possibly, we’ve found another use for the chairs in the Silliman courtyard. See: Original Master of the Universe.

v In Silliman, it matters when money is spent. There is no winery, or special night of Italian food, or bottle of champagne for every senior. The student cocktail parties are fueled by buttery snacks on paper plates. There are sometimes rats in the basement. These small lackings are exacerbated by relativism, the gauge of life at Yale where everything is judged by what it is not. It is still Yale and grand and all that, but “we don’t have a winery” and “my freshman counselor ran out of the good candy.” So the Adirondack chairs feel new and special. In them, you can sit and aspire to something greater, a college more like the one in “Mona Lisa Smile” where Kirsten Dunst fell in love and married a doctor and still found feminism. It is where everyone walks their dogs and throws their Frisbees and pretends it is warm enough for lawn furniture. It is a vestige, maybe, something to hold onto when the anxious winds of Recession and Political Correctness and Institutional Memory come beating at the gates. This is the Institution’s last pair of real gold earrings: seventeen Adirondack Chairs in chili pepper red and chili pepper green.

yale institute of sacred music presents

Krista Tippett

The Mystery and Art of Living tuesday, november 3 · 5:30 pm battell chapel The Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, New York Times bestselling author, and recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal says, “Virtues – so closely bound to our flaws and failings – lie at the heart of the mystery of the human capacity to be present to the flawed and failing world.”

Free; no tickets required. ism.yale.edu Book-signing follows. Presented in collaboration with Yale Divinity Student Book Supply.

yale literature & spirituality series

— Olivia Klevorn is a junior in Silliman College