1. El vaiven means knife or, literally translated, the come-and-go. Don’t think of knife as in housebound kitchen utensil, used responsibly on vegetables and refrigerated meats, but in the sense of switchblade, tucked underarm then released in a territorial street squabble. El vaiven is sometimes used interchangeably with el fierro, the steel or the iron.
I prefer el vaiven, the verb turned noun, over the noun, el fierro. A blade is not just what it is made up of, steel, it is also a glint in the darkness, a swipe through the air and then gone, when it is used for its main purpose and when it is used well.
Just as how you view the world shapes your language, I believe the language you use shapes your worldview. The choice of el vaiven over el fierro reflects the way I want to see the world and the people within it, to see the people I meet and know for what they are, through what they do, through behavior: their gestures, their responses to messy happenstance, their reluctance, the heady, ill-informed leaps. We, I hope, are but more than our history, our jobs, our family, the twine of double helix strands.
If I am the weighty cumulative physics of every action and inaction, then I want to examine the reasoning behind my choices, before I make them.
2. El vaiven also refers to people of the diaspora, because they come and go between countries. My parents are el vaiven. I used to associate leaving as a marker of courage, because that’s what I think my parents possessed for leaving, at the age I am now, for the unknown. Possibility doesn’t feed physical hunger: theirs or generations of family.
My notions of success, of what makes a person good, of the meaning of atonement differs widely from those of my parents. When it comes to leaving though, my parents agree with me: courage, this time, means staying, finding my own form of upheaval. Courage isn’t copying my parents’ immigration.
Courage is deepening roots.
3. Some people in the world sell their bodies for a living, and they’re judged as if they are their jobs, prostitution as their sole identity and endemic.
There exists a group of people, part of a program to eradicate human trafficking. The overseas organization finds them a different line of work, hiring the women, children and men to craft household goods.
When I am discouraged–one day is a day too many– I think of the group. Their philanthropy isn’t a recycling of timeworn tactics. They understand change doesn’t occur through criticism, no matter how informed, or money, no matter how much.
I hope to find a solution as fleshed out and refreshingly different for the city I live in, a place with an ailing core. My neglected city needs a different type of labor of its body.
