Botswana Trip

If you are interested in my trip to Botswana please go to smashpooh.wordpress.com

Thanks

Ashley

Size and body image

So, apparently this is a hot topic again. I've had my own issues with my body image and size. As a teenager I was an athlete and I could literally put anything and everything into my body with no consequences. Then I had a baby, which changed my body forever. Initially I played sports and although my frame had changed, I was pretty slim. However, when I stopped playing sports (as what happens to many women of my age (PPS there really should be more all women's sports teams across Los Angeles)), I put on weight and I have had more than one shopping trip that ended in tears. Its not that I think curves aren't beautiful, its just that we have really been programmed to believe that only a certain type of curves are beautiful. I had a baby and I still don't have hips and my guess is, it just won't ever happen for me. Thankfully there are plenty of fat activist and just beautiful women talking about fashion and body image. Like: http://www.youngfatandfabulous.com/, who is the cousin of one of my favorite friends.

Mostly, all women, and men for that matter need to begin to work on healing themselves and loving the way they look now. Even if your not healthy or not the weight you desire, setting out on a diet without loving yourself will never give you the satisfaction you desire. To love yourself is a lifetime journey that begins today, not 10lbs from now. Its something I struggle with daily (shit hourly, because after I ate my Carl's Jr. lunch, my clothes looked different). Being "healthy" according to standards that have nothing to do with you will never change your spiritual and mental health.

In Love,

Paz y Resistance

Allow me to reintroduce myself...

So I love writing and reading and generally digesting the written and spoken word. I think a lot and I read often but, somehow that never translated into a successful blogging career. I practically write essays on other people blogs, but yet mine sits alone untouched. Why? Well I have a few theories.

Firstly, people of color and women often second guess themselves. Yes all people second guess themselves, but oppressed people have encountered a world in which we are always undermined. Our knowledge and our history is deemed unessential and our voice is too often lost. Second, I have experienced depression for most of my life. If you have every experienced any type of depression you know how difficult it is to create, even though creativity is some of the best medicine. Creativity, music, writing is like a life raft for your soul and when you find your self drowning in a sea of doubt and depression, like you are lost and gasping for air, it is one thing I most often forget.

But recently, I have missed writing. I have missed the thrill of sitting down with a blank page and literally providing voice where there was once nothing. I know that today the Internet is over saturated with people voices and thoughts, but I cannot let others deter me from creating. So if no one ever reads this blog, it will be my own person journal, and I will continue to introduce and redefine myself in this space!

Paz y resistance

To Inglewood (Part 1)

in the summertime

To the city whom I love and left and always long to return
I reminisce on the nourishment that you gave me
Growing learning loving
Hidden in the two bedroom apartment on Market Street
From the gunshots, the drive by’s
The drug deals in my garage
Ridding my bike by the late summertime light
Thanking god for the daylight savings, inviting me to trek one more time up the hill before I was inevitable called, beckoned, speeding down,
Down into the safety once more
No matter the pain and aguish, market street was home, messy roach infested home that it was, it was home
A bastard home that was not fit for four, little light skinned children destined to become intellectuals (Berkeley, Irvine and Santa Cruz don’t you know)
I, never knowing the ‘dangers,’ only the limitations of my exploration
I, never knowing the ‘poverty,’ only knowing to never leave the food out for too long because the bugs would get in it
I, never knowing the black box, only knowing the summertime hbo movies
Hoping for Tatino’s chicken fingers and big sticks
I, never knowing the people, never knowing the people
Lost in translation, the community, the people the potential friends were always potential enemies and the curiosity became fear, not fear of those who created Inglewood Compton South Central Bedford Sty Southside Chicago East Oakland, Brooklyn
But the fear of people with skin tones deep and dark, warm and golden, the beautiful complexity of street intellectuals, rebels, warriors comrades my people, foundation for my struggle
The women only loud and fast
The men only deviously out to get me, money, drugs
One the devil incarnate
One the wrong kind of feminine
All wrong

Going Natural

This semester has changed in so many ways, I changed my major, I decided what I want to do for at least the next 7-10 years and I decided to go natural. What this means is instead of putting chemicals in my hair thereby destroying it and spending hundreds of dollars trying to repair it I am going to embrace my naturally beautiful curly hair. So far so good. For a lot of women this process is frustrating, time consuming and frightening and I would say in general the same goes for me. I am afraid of what my dad is going to say and I know my granny is going to call it ugly and tell me dad to make me get a relaxer again (as if my dad could tell me to do anything anymore, I'm 21, I gave birth and I am getting married). I don't know what my sorority sisters are going to say and am I going to be able to meet the recruitment standards? Will I be able to get a job this summer? May be I'm over reacting but I feel like this is the reality for black women. Natural hair is unprofessional and radical, and while I may be radical I can easily conform to the white idea of professionalism.
More than all these worries I am actually trying to teach my self how to care for natural hair because I never have had to. By the time I began making my own hair decisions I had relaxed hair. Well more updates to come...

MEXICO (a poetryprose selection)

Let’s be honest
I went to Mexico to drink
Dos Equis, Corona
To act as all stupid Americans do
The depression was unexpected
As I glanced at the thousands of
Demonstrators on the front page of the LA Times
And headlines that Villaraigosa doesn’t always bend to his constituents
What a fucking joke
Those children knew the consequences
And their brave naivety
Struck me square between the eyes
As the Mexicoach carried my friends and I
(Reading as Berkeley girls do)
South with intoxicated 19 year old San Diego State women
Scorning all of us for our lack of Spring Break fever
It struck me square between the eyes
As the crumbling houses (if you could call them that)
Passed too quickly to count by our window.
In our Berkeley Bleeding heart hippie liberal way
Our sadness became quickly evident upon our faces
As we quickly agreed that the horrors of an untouchable government
That would build condos next to a home with no windows and no roof.

As we continued we blocked out the drunken tequila shots behind us and the abject poverty beside us,
And dove back into our Berkeley girl books hating the noise along the way.
I wanted to have a good time.
But somewhere between the numerous ass grabbing’s by Mexican and American men,
The dirt streets muddied by the storm,
The poor women trying (and achieving in) selling us fake Channel sunglasses,
The trip back to my friends’ homes (one that just sold for over $1 Million)
And the trip back to my parents 2 bedroom apartment (for 6, 5 without me) with a toilet that shifts, in a over caffinated white neighborhood I realized that it’s all my fault.

I’m not trying to give myself too much credit but
If high school aged young men and women can risk their lives protesting a racist piece of legislation that continues to ban Mexicans from a land that is rightfully theirs while I waste my Berkeley education on Corona, clubs and hotel accommodations it is my fault.

May be the Mexican landscape looks as it does because wealthy whites stole their homes, labeled them as other and tried to force them into a territory so could claim this fine piece of real estate called California so they could sell their homes for $1.2 Million dollars while a mother tries to scrape together $20 Pesos (max $2 US) to buy a taco for her son. If that isn’t racism what is?
So may be I didn’t create this system. May be I, as a woman of color, don’t have the power to effect change but I do have the autonomy (and a great Berkeley education to back me up) to choose not to participate in this system.

I'll do better next time, I promise.

Too many questions

"That slavery that feeds on the psychology invading the soul of man, destroying his loyalties to himself and establishing loyalties to the forces which descry him, is an even worse form of capture" (Akbar N. "Chains and images of psychological Slavery" P.2)

I don't know if 2006 is worse than 1806? What do you think? Modern day enslavement at the hands of whom? Who is the enemy, the person that put us in chains? George Bush? Gansta Rap? Who is the ally, white liberals? Rev. Al Sharpton? I don't know the answers I can speculate but I am no expert, only a black women trying to make it through and make sense of the fact that my community is in a perpetual state of poverty and that hasn't changed since the Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria. Were we ever emancipated? And if we were from what and to what? In this land of opportunity why are so many people of color without? Too many questions, yes I know. Not enough answers, yes I know. I'll give you one answer: those who we thought were our allies betrayed us fed us to the wolves for power glory and prestige. The enemy has never changed, only hidden himself in shrouds of legal battles and due process.