THE CASTLE IS BURNING

or ACTIVISM

At Rutgers, I was a casual activist; I was radical light.  What is it they say in the Bible?  I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot.  That was me: lukewarm.   When Amiri Baraka wasn’t offered tenure by the English Department, I went to all the protests, shouted with the best of them.  When the Rutgers Gay Alliance or the Black and Latine orgs called folks out, I showed up.  A white dude papered my dorm with a racist “Asian” menu as a "joke"— of course I joined the push-back. 

I participated — marched, waved signs, chanted — but never went the full Lumumba like some of my friends, never really committed.  During those first semesters at Rutgers I had acquired a serious justice orientation, believed in revolution the way only the young and the angry and the despised can, had all sorts of idealism.  Problem was, I also happened to be a working poor kid from a conservative Dominican immigrant family — my father had been a cop in the Dominican Republic, completely pro-dictatorship, never met a police action he didn’t like — and my mom’s fear of authority was epic; she believed in keeping your head down the way other people believed in God.  Not that I was cool with either my disappeared-father or my mother, but when you’re an immigrant kid who grew up inside of the Immigrant Family Industrial Complex, family bonds have weight, even if the family was as fucked up as mine. 

Didn’t help that my old neighborhood — where my mom still lives — was only 20 minutes from New Brunswick or that both my sister and my brother attended Rutgers with me, all in the same year.  Neither of my siblings engaged in any kind of campus politics, were classic hard working head-down immigrant student types.  If you had time to join an organization you had time for another job — that was their logic, more or less.  They were exactly who I was supposed to be. 

But during my first semester I had fallen in with the activists and the art freaks and most of these kids had used their school days to remake themselves or at least to throw themselves, if not headfirst, then with some enthusiasm into the whole university countercultural experience.  I had done some remaking; decided that I wanted to write, a serious betrayal of the family immigrant logic (practical majors only, we fucking poor) but that breach was all I could manage.  Despite all my passion for activism, all my conviction that a better world was possible, all my admiration for the radicals around me, I didn’t seem to be able to move closer to what called me.  All I could do was stand at the edge; couldn’t, for the life of me jump.   

My family a chain that not even Sethe could bite through¹. 

After I graduated Rutgers I ended up at Cornell.  Four hours from home, no siblings, no one who knew me at all — Ithaca should have been the perfect place for a phoenix event, but nope.  I had the radical yearning in me, went to the Black and Latine student organization meetings, talked politics with my grad school peers, became a diversity “trainer”, but I was still smoldering, all smoke no phoenix.  Couldn’t bring myself to jump in, to ignite wholeheartedly. 

That is, until fall semester, second year, when artist Daniel J. Martinez took over the heart of the campus with his installation, The Castle is Burning.  He bordered the six main paths on the Arts Quad with tall black walls that blocked the view and were topped with messages like “In the rich man’s house, the only place to spit is in his face.”  

I’d never experienced public art on that scale, so close, so wild, so fuck-you confrontational.  I was confused and annoyed and mesmerized by it — but a lot of the squares straight up hated it.  You couldn’t go anywhere near the quad without hearing the disparagement.  Within days the installation’s walls were defaced with racist graffiti — I remember the swastika and “beaners go home” — and that was the last straw for the Latine community on campus; the next thing you knew they had linked up with the Black students (and a few other allies) and taken over Day Hall².

I was in my apartment trying to write a story when it happened, got a call from my Newark boy that the students needed support right now.  I lived at the bottom of the hill (Ithaca folks know what I’m talking about) and it was mid-way through November cold (Ithaca folks know what I’m talking about) and I had a story to finish for workshop, but I guess in that place and time my lukewarm was warm enough.  I put on my gear and trudged up the hill. 

I still wonder what might have happened — who I might have become — had I stayed typing. 

Day Hall was a fucking scene.  Students inside the building yelling down from the windows for folks to join them.  Students out front trying to join the students inside the building and a string of campus and local cops blocking the front door.  I knew a lot of the students inside, including the leader of the undergraduates, Eduardo Peñalver (who is now president of Seattle University) . 

One of the students called me over.  “We’re going to try to break through.  You in?”

“Sure, I said. 

I should have been worried — about my fellowship, at least — but I wasn’t.  Maybe because I figured this was Cornell, with Ivy League consequences.  Maybe because my father had been a cop and beaten me so often that the prospect of being roughed up by a non-family member officer of the law didn’t stress me like it should have.  I mean, I hated cops and stayed away from them because I knew that they could fuck you up for life, but I didn’t fear them at a fundamental level.  Maybe it was just overconfidence; I was weightlifting in those days and might have looked like nothing in my always-oversized clothes, but I was strong as a motherfucker.

Or maybe it was the smoldering I’ve been talking about, my lukewarmness finally beginning to flame.  After all, life rarely offers up moments like this one, with such perfect psychologically clarity: the line of cops symbolizing the line inside of me.  All I had to do was break through the cops and I would break through within.

No long conversation.  A sudden signal and a half-dozen of us rushed the line, the students in the windows above roaring.  I tried to juke by this one swolt cop but he grabbed me up, and judo-threw me right on my ass.   My boy Homero still laughs about that take-down. 

Talk about weak-sauce.  None of us made it through.  The cop line held.  So much for psychological clarity.  I jumped up, furious, ready to make another run at it but a boss type must have decided that someone was going to get hurt and ordered the cops to step aside.  Victorious, the students poured into Day Hall; I limped after them. 

You made it, my boy said, clapping me on my bruised back.

I nodded, my hands shaking.  I didn’t know it then but the chain that I had been gnawing on for all those years had finally snapped. 

I was no longer on the periphery; I was in. 

1. “if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away”
― Toni Morrison, BELOVED

2. I wrote about this experience from another angle here: