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The Cycle of Hegemonic Oppression
Or Why I Hate
Stupid Mexicans
By
Dustin Wells
I don’t even know why they’re picking on me. I was here before them. I moved into this apartment two years ago. They’ve only been downstairs for eight months. They’re trying to make my life a living hell. I think these immigrants enjoy it. They’re trying to drive me out. But now it’s come to this. Police banging on my door. My boyfriend is in handcuffs on the sidewalk with six cop cars around him. The revolution is nigh. This is my story.
When me and my two friends moved into the city, we were not prepared for San Francisco rents at all. We only found one apartment that was in our price range. The day the old Chinese lady showed the place, we went to the Salvation Army, bought business clothes, made up jobs for the application, and stayed around for the whole four-hour opening. We walked through all seven rooms planning who would get which bedroom, and which room would be the computer room and which room would be the yoga room.
Then we called the old Chinese lady who owned it like fifty times a day asking when we could move in. Then we tried to harness the psychic energy of the universe by standing outside and chanting zogs-chen-ati-rig-pa every night until the universe let us move in.
My friends didn’t even last three months, because no one would hire them and they didn’t want to be strippers. But by then the whole dot.com boom hit, and the rent in the city skyrocketed. Our rent was 800 dollars but could easily go for like two thousand bucks now. I rented out three of the empty bedrooms for seven-fifty each, which allowed me to go to New College to study Photography For Social Change.
Then the animosity started like this. The greedy landlord rented out the front half of the floor below us as a restaurant. After a day of hammering and painting and just making a lot of noise in general, this new Taqueria started playing mariachi music from eight in the morning until eleven at night.
These old Victorian homes were not built to take the sounds of mega bass speakers. And what’s the deal with that polka beat? Trying to be like all cool, these mariachi people took the mega-bass from rappers, so now we got mega-bass polka music thumping away fifteen hours a day.
I tried to work it out. Right away, I made my presence known. I went down there and informed them that it’s hard to sleep with crazy Mexican mega-bass polka music making my bed shake at nine in the morning and would they have the decency to turn it down? But I got this blank stare from their timid brown faces. Why? Because they don’t speak English.
When I eco-tour in the Rainforest to save turtles, I always brush up on my Spanish, so why can’t they do that for us? I mean, it’s like they live in America. It’s not like I would travel to Costa Rica and demand everyone speak English, even though almost everyone I met there does. But okay, I’m cool with their choice not to even try to languagally integrate.
So I mimicked me -- I pointed to me -- and then I made a sleeping face by resting my head on my hands and closing my hands. Then I pointed at my bedroom floor, which is their ceiling. Then I yelled over the music that my bed is shaking to the omp-pa omp-pa beat. I mimicked me in my shaking bed. They nodded and looked away as if they understood.
So I went upstairs, and the whole apartment was still omp-pa throbbing. I heard some of the workers rolling garbage cans down the alleyway so I filled a pot full of water and threw it on them and screamed, Shut up!
It’s not like I don’t feel for them. There’s like twenty of them in this tiny shop all day. And the same twenty are there at night cleaning up. Then a big white van comes and picks them up. And then the same big white van brings them back at eight in the morning. Those people should get organized and strike or something. I try to document as many of these injustices as I can for my Photography for Social Change courses. The guy who drives the van is Latino too, but he looks mean and wears lots of rings.
I stand on my stoop at eleven at night and dart out into the street and take pictures of this evil man forcing these underpaid workers into the van to haul them off to probably another job somewhere. These people work fifteen-hour days slaving to make Mexican food, which is very tasty by the way, but I’m sure they’re not getting overtime or even minimum wage. I understand their plight, that’s why I have no idea why they’re being so lame about their mega-bass Mexican polka music.
I have a lot of exquisite pictures for my New College Social Change Thesis Anarchist Slideshow and Performance Punk Art Extravaganza this upcoming August, which I hope the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper will cover, but will probably not because my show exposes a lot of unpleasant truths that most of their readers refuse to acknowledge much less deal with.
And speaking of injustices, I don’t see how New College can be a school for the People, as they claim, when it’s as expensive as it is. I just hope they know that I’m never paying for my classes. That is my protest in the face of their oppressive tuition costs. You have to be a rich white kid from hegemonic parents to afford to go there.
When they refused to give me a scholarship to support my obvious talent, I signed up for all these loans with my old roommate’s social security number anyway. Part of my slideshow is a great photograph of my tuition bill ripped up and stapled to my naked body with all these like fake arrows. I think it gets the point across in an Urgent, Concise, Robust, but Subtle way, which the Chronicle, that corporate money-making paper would know nothing about.
And since we’re on the topic of oppression. During the whole dot.com boom, the Mission started this whole anti-white people campaign. They painted murals with like a fake newspaper with the headline reading,
Last Surviving Mexican Seen In the Mission.
I’m opposed to gentrification too. I went out there with my socially conscious anarchist neo-primitives and keyed and sliced the tires of all those dot.com SUVs too. I’m with the Mexicans. I’m an artist. I can’t afford to pay rent any more than they can. I’m on food stamps too. And guess what? Just last week when I woke up to move my car away from the tyranny of the Thursday noon to two street sweeper, I saw that someone broke the back windows out of my car. And it’s not an SUV at all. It’s a Volkswagon Jetta, clearly the car of the socially conscious counter culture.
And there was like this bench full of black kids from the projects right across the street just laughing at me. I went and got the cops and told them that the black kids sitting on the benches busted out the windows of my car.
I didn’t feel bad about calling the cops at all. Maybe those drug dealers could go to jail and educate themselves like Malcom X did so they would know how wrong it was to laugh at me and violate my socially conscious car the way they did.
But the police asked me how long I lived here and why I still had Connecticut plates! And don’t think I don’t know that the fascist pig cops treated me that way because of my socially conscious bumper stickers, My Goddess Gave Birth to Your God, and Free Mumia and Bicycling – A Quiet Statement Against Oil Wars, to name a few. Soon, after the Revolution, when these hegemonic oppressors are in jail, maybe they’ll have to clean toilets like Gandhi did.
This brings me back to the tragedy that happened today. My boyfriend is in the socially conscious band, The Pimple Cocks. They rock and they have a message too. My boyfriend stands on the keyboard in a vinyl nun’s outfit and shoves a microphone up his ass. The Pimple Cocks are totally against the hegemonic fifth Reich the United States has become.
At eleven o’clock this Saturday morning, we were sleeping in because the Pimple Cocks played a show in some hella cool guy’s garage in Oakland, and then we woke to the ompah music. I’m telling you, my floor was vibrating with their mega-bass polka sounds. It’s like these people can’t just work quietly for one moment.
I ran down my stairs and into this short little man with a hat that shows an eagle carrying an American flag. This short man swung his mop towards me, attacking me, and it went right over my combat boots, which I didn’t tie, and these like toxic chemicals got all over my ankles. That kind of repression might be okay in his paternalistic machismo Mexican hemegemoic culture where he’s from, but this Rrrrrrrrrt Grrrrrrrrrr wasn’t having it! So I screamed a battle cry! And then I yelled, I know Mexicans beat their wives and become alcoholics in America because your wives make just as much or more money than you and this belittles you so you beat them and drink a lot and spend all your dinero on tequilla.
This man was properly kowtowed by my strong feminist stance. I have caused him to think, and then I heard one of the customers mutter, Ugly fat bitch.
I am a goddess! And I have a medical problem with my hair! I hate to say it, but I started crying and ran back upstairs.
My boyfriend, who legally changed his name to Pimple Cock, went downstairs and yanked the mega-bass speaker off the counter and smashed it in the street these people had the audacity to call the police.
I do not know how illegal Mexican immigrants can legally call the police and have my boyfriend arrested for smashing a speaker that I asked them politely to remove so many times.
I fear that it’s coming to the point where anything a white person says – And I’m not even white, I’m Italian! – is devalued in this increasingly racially hostile time.
Truly, in the Mission District, I am the minority. And I am oppressed by mariachi music. And I’m moving back to Connecticut!
Copyright © 2007 Dustin Wells
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