Hello!

It’s me, Esteban, making good on a year-old promise to start sending newsletters. I’m here now on Substack and am trying to get more in the habit of sending out these little notes as they come. Stay for the whole piece, maybe pick out one or two that interests you and let me know what you think. I’m excited to grow together with much more to come 🧑🏾‍🚀

On Freedom

I have been trying to get back into reading regularly and the book that keeps bringing me back to my Kindle (the certified hot girl accessory of the summer) is Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom. In this book, she takes up the idea of freedom — what we think it is and how this idea may not be true — across art, sex, drugs, and the climate. Each section is a tapestry of fragments stitched together into “four songs of care and constraint.”

In the first section, Nelson takes up the promises of art, the healing power we often force onto it today, how freedom can be complicated by the very same drives for a more just world. She turns to recent “cancelled” art works such as Sam Durant’s “Scaffold” and Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” not to rebuke their creators (or vindicate them) but instead ask how it is that artistic representation comes to hold as much power as history/politics and why we now expect art to be a space that heals us, makes us whole, and cares for us. Of course, it’s not as simple as “let anyone make what they want” — it is this attitude that has enabled centuries of “speaking for” and systematic violence against communities below the weight of white settler colonialism. But I wonder, alongside Nelson, if there might be some third way of exploration that doesn’t foreclose experimentation, doesn’t deny a being with one another, and doesn’t replicate the differentiating logic of problematic/unproblematic that shapes both culture and the carceral state alike. While we can and should abandon the mythos of a machismo creative genius who gets away with blurring (or destroying) lines, it feels impossible to create anything that doesn’t also have the residue of our own place in the world. Nelson calls it “naive and unfair to expect artists and writers to have special access to the most intense, extreme, or painful aspects of life, then to act surprised and appalled when they turn out to have a relationship to those things that exceeds that of abstract contemplation or simple critique.”

Another thing that has come up for me is how much art can actually do vs. how much I am just fooling myself with bourgeois aesthetic fantasies. I feel this when I walk through the most cutting edge art galleries with my family and feel their alienation from scattered trash that you can only access through stacks of dense theory. I feel it when I spend my time home working on my own projects while my loved ones wait for me to resurface to the world. I can do all I want to convince myself that this noble work will help envision a better future but what about the stuff of right here right now where creation threatens to pull me away from my communities in need at every turn?

“Making art won’t feel like reparative labor,” Nelson writes, “it will feel like sanding aluminum for eight hours and breathing in toxic dust, wondering why you’re not hanging out with your family or binge-watching Netflix or visiting your sick mother or performing labor guaranteed to pay instead of cost. It will feel, and perhaps it will be, indefensible despite your developed ability to claim aluminum sanding as a blueprint for a utopian future.”

In the aftermath of assassination,

I came across a post on the Veteranas y Rucas Instagram page remembering Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination in Los Angeles and Juan Romero, the hotel busboy, who held Kennedy as he bled to death. He was 17 years old when Kennedy visited the Ambassador Hotel. As he reached out to shake the candidate’s hand, he was shot by a Palestinian-Jordanian man fighting against Kennedy’s support of Israel. As Kennedy dropped to the floor, Romero tried to protect his head from hitting the concrete. With his hand behind his gaping head, Romero took a rosary from his shirt pocket and wrapped it in Kennedy’s right hand as they took him away.

Still from Wildness, Wu Tsang (2012)

Los Angeles’s oldest gay bar might be demolished…

causing a stir in the LGBTQ and Latinx communities it has supported for decades. Opened in 1963, the Silver Platter has been a safe haven for many, especially immigrant and trans communities. Recently, the bar's liquor license was suspended for 30 days, coinciding suspiciously with efforts to approve a demolition permit. This timing, during Pride Month, has raised concerns about possible collusion between city officials and developers. Preservationist Mike Callahan proposed a plan to save the bar, but city officials have not responded. Additionally, a flawed historic assessment report ignored the bar's cultural importance. The Silver Platter's story, highlighted in Wu Tsang's 2012 documentary Wildness, underscores the ongoing struggle to balance progress with the preservation of important community spaces.

This bar was also the subject (and narrator) of the 2012 speculative documentary, Wildness. I watched this documentary a few months ago before the planned demolition was announced. The film takes the space as a character, even giving it a voice who narrates the lives that cross within the Silver Platter. A longtime underground haven for queer Latinx and immigrant intimacy, the space was expanded when a group of avant-garde (read: college-educated bourgeois) queers “discovered” it as the perfect venue for their performance event — “Wildness.”

While the documentary (made by “Wildness” organizer and artist Wu Tsang) celebrates the shared experience of their boundary-breaking event and a more authentic clientele, I was stuck with bad feelings around the infiltration of urban space even when it is done by those who also experience marginalization. The performers dance in ghost sheets, play loud DJ sets, and growl out suicidal lyrics while some of the club’s original patrons cluster in the back. Over the din, the Silver Platter itself narrates (in Spanish, with subtitles): “Amongst the ladies, Wildness was known as ‘Tuesdays.’ Many of them were confused. It disrupted their routine. It was strange for them to be in their own space and not be worshipped like the beauties they are.”

I admire the documentary’s ability to turn on itself and consider that such implications may exist but it seems like there is no real pressure to solve them or change course. These questions have only multiplied in the past months as the very existence of the bar is under question by the “gringos of every shade” looking for a good time. As a college-educated, Brown queer artist living in LA now myself, I am asking the same questions of myself as I walk past my neighbors on the brink of eviction for the very same luxury development projects to welcome in other creatives (who may or may not be queer or BIPOC) who all want the same iced pistachio matcha. 

I was served this photo by Siri

of me and my grandmother, Rachael. As she gets older, her shifting memory has been tearing something deep inside me. I like this photo because it helps me remember a time before and also helps me attune to her new — not necessarily failing — memory terrain.