Road Trip!

This week I got to go to a site visit to our Rio Grande Valley region! I flew into San Antonio and met up with my friend/colleague, and we drove down to the valley together. I knew it was rural, but I didn't realize that meant you can drive a looooooooong time without passing a gas station or other place to use the bathroom - hence one of the first things I did there was pee behind a tree. My friend documented my triumphant post-pee return to the car (I'm bringing her a flower for pulling over):

After we got to the region, a lot of the staff laughed and told stories of running out of gas on that road because of not filling up their tank before heading out. The first night there we had dinner on the Rio Grande:

And we hung out with our colleague and her twin babies:

You can see the other baby in the background.

We ate a lot of great food while we were there, but we became particularly obsessed with Taco Palenque, a South Texas fast food taco chain with great (cheap!) tacos and a huge fresh salsa bar:

This fed 4 people and cost about $15.

We ended up eating three meals in a row there, and I have no regrets.

The twins' mom works with us, and her husband works for homeland security, so on our last day he took us out to the border.

It was a weird place to be - it was beautiful with the river and all the trees, but that beauty was criss-crossed by a ton of electrified, barbed-wire fences all over the place. It was cool to stand with a foot in each country, but also humbling how easy it was for us to hop back and forth over that arbitrary line while so many people die trying to cross it each year. When my (Black) colleague and I were driving back North we got waved through the checkpoint, but when she went through it earlier this year with a Latina friend they were stopped, searched, and grilled for a long time before being allowed to pass. I know I always have white privilege, but it was painfully acute there.

Wednesday after work we drove back to San Antonio and met up with another friend. We were only there for a night, but we ate some killer food.

Giant mangonada!

Elote! In a cup!

Thursday we worked from the San Antonio office for the day, and then after work drove to New Orleans (where my colleague lives) - it was an eight hour drive and we got there around 1 am, but it was worth it. We worked from the New Orleans office on Friday, and then had Friday night to wander around the city. We spent a while just walking around looking at all the beautiful houses and yards, and in Louis Armstrong park, which contains Congo Square. We eventually ended up at a place where they were grilling oysters in the street, so we got a big pan of oysters Rockefeller to share:

We ate a bunch of other great food that night, but those were definitely the best. I don't even usually like oysters, but I could have eaten that whole pan by myself.

This morning we went to an awesome breakfast spot, where we had PRALINE BACON and really excellent fried green tomatoes:

We also had a "french toast burrito" (a breakfast burrito where the tortilla had been given the french toast treatment beforehand), a cornbread waffle with sweet potato and roast duck on top, and an egg/cabbage/sausage extravaganza with an ocean of grits:

We walked around some more to try and walk off the food coma before heading to the airport to return home. It was a great week, and now I am done all my eating for the rest of April.

Spring Cleaning

Ben and I spent today going through all the various drawers and closets in the house and getting rid of stuff we don't need any more. We found some pretty ancient treasures:

The best thing we found was a letter from Ben's grandparents accompanying a gift card they sent him in college:

Dear Ben,

You can use this card at any Harvard/MIT Coop store. The magnetic strip "knows" that it is for $25, but also keeps track of what you spend until $25 is reached. So if you spend $3 you won't get any change, but the card will now be for $22. I thought it would come with your name on it but since it doesn't, anyone could use it if lost of stolen. So you'd better spend it fast either for food for your brain or food for your body or anything else that hits your fancy.

Love,
Grand Mom and Grand Dad

My favorite part of this letter is imagining the phone call(s?) between Ben's grandparents and some hapless Coop employee to get all of those details sorted out. I'm sure one day we'll send our grandchild an equally adorable letter explaining in painstaking detail how to use the neurotransplant credits or whatever we just sent them!

Learning things: History update

Since I first wrote about re-learning history from a more holistic perspective, I have finished all the next steps I initially committed to doing. I'm learning a ton and really enjoying it, so I am going to continue this project!

What I've done since last time:

• A People's History of the United States: I'm still struggling with how I feel about this one a bit. On the one hand, it was inspiring to learn about all the people's movements that have resisted governmental policies and actions throughout the country's history - I always thought that things like Manifest Destiny had fairly unanimous popular support, and that's why we fought wars and displaced people to take over so much land. On the other hand, it was pretty depressing to realize that despite all that resistance, most of the horrific and oppressive things in US history happened anyway. But, I definitely learned a LOT that I didn't previously know, so I am grateful for that knowledge.
• Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year: This one was from more of a narrative perspective, and was very engaging to read. I knew that Dr. King lost a lot of popular support when he spoke out against the Vietnam war and began working on an anti-poverty campaign, but I didn't realize that he also lost substantial support from within the civil rights movement. He so often gets painted as the patron saint of peace and tolerance, in a way that is used to try and shut down resistance to contemporary oppression (how many people chastised the Ferguson protestors with "what would MLK do??"), but that really does not align with how he saw his work and what he spent the last year of his life doing. He never wavered from his belief in nonviolence, but he also believed in "radical" policies like withdrawing American troops from overseas and using military funding for domestic social programs instead, and he stood by those beliefs at all costs.
• Online class on the history of American education reform: I didn't do any of the homework or tests, but I did listen to all the lectures for the whole term. Parts of it were pretty dry, but other parts were fascinating - it was particularly interesting to learn about how federal vs local control of schools has been a contentious issue going back as long as there has been a federal government. It was also interesting to learn about how most teachers' unions were radically liberal when they were first established, to the point that they were derided as communist infiltrators during the McCarthy era because they advocated things like ending poverty. It would be awesome if teachers' unions today took such strong stances on social justice issues.
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong: I added this one to my initial list after a friend recommended it. It's not a history book per se, but a book about how we teach history. The author read the most commonly used history textbooks in the US, then analyzed how they tell history - what they include, what they leave out,  and what they misrepresent. I definitely learned some history along the way, but I most appreciated his analysis of not just how history is (mis)taught, but why it is taught that way, the effects of learning one-sided and incomplete history, and what it would take to change it. This book was also much less dense than People's History, and I found myself staying up late at night to read it.

What I'm doing next: I want to zoom in on the histories of specific groups that are typically erased from mainstream historical narratives. I got a bit more information from People's History and Lies My Teacher Told Me, but they are overview texts, and they also aren't written by the people in the relevant group. So, here's what's coming up next:

• Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. The autobiography of Wilma Mankiller, former Chief of the Cherokee Nation, which tells the story of both her life and the history of the Cherokee people. A few different people have recommended this book to me, so I am excited to read it!
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I actually started reading this one already, because it was the first to come in from the library. The author spends some time writing against previously held anthropological/archaeological beliefs about pre-contact Indians that I didn't know about in the first place, so those parts are less interesting to me, but he also writes extensively about the advanced level of art, poetry, engineering, politics, urban planning, etc... in the Americas hundreds, and even thousands, of years before European contact. One of his main theses so far is that (mostly White) researchers have tried, consciously or not, to downplay both the population numbers and the level of "civilization" of Native populations to also downplay the extent of the genocide perpetrated against them, and therefore assuage White guilt.
• Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. Embarrassingly, almost all of what I know about Asian American history is about railroads and internment camps, which is a pitifully small piece of the picture. I'm looking forward to rectifying that.
• Racism On Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. I also know pitifully little about Latin@ history, so I'm going to start here. I know Mexican Americans are not representative of all Latin@ Americans, but I'm hoping this will be a good starting place and will lead to recommendations for further reading.
• City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. Aside from Stonewall I know almost nothing about LGBTQ history and the fight for LGBTQ rights, so I am looking forward to learning more, especially in the context of Philadelphia specifically.

If you have recommendations for additional reading, send them my way!