A Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck

Esteban Jordan - El Cascabel

SERMONS! isn’t really a place for politics, other than what the music I highlight here has already done or said. But this last week in The U.S. has been so ugly (and expected) that the bloated rotting tentacles of twenty-first century civics have breached the open spaces I have left exposed. So to counter this terrible feeling of alien-ness at what I have seen, I contemplated my place in the fabric of American society.

It led me to a memory of one of the most American days I’ve ever experienced.

I don’t celebrate the 4th of July. When I was a kid, maybe the fireworks aspect of it, but over time the connotations of those fireworks, set off by a nation at endless war, in celebration of itself, seems no different than a totalitarian military parade. Not into it. I just end up thinking that this sonic cosplay represents the fear and death and chaos and pain the power of American might has thrust upon so much of the world.

One year, though, I did it, the big celebration, the huge hullabaloo.

San Antonio is a military city. By that, I mean its population. There are a number of bases there, and a huge population of active and retired service members. Also, San Antonio is a brown city. Almost two-thirds of the population identify as Hispanic / Latinx. There’s a lot of patriotism and legacy.

I was supposed to go to San Antonio with my best friend, a girl he was sleeping with, and her friend, like a double date of sorts. He was a bit of a player. At the last minute, he bailed the whole thing for another girl who’d invited him to a barbecue. I wasn’t invited to that.

So, the morning of, I rode an hour and a half with these two girls I barely knew to San Antonio.

I’ll leave out names. We’ll call girl one “C”. She was half Filipino, half Mexican-American. She was a nut, and was always talking about her chanclas for some reason . Her friend we’ll call “M”. Fully Latina. Wild bleached hair. Then there’s me. Yeah, I pass for White, but it’s complicated and I’m still unsure of it all because being an American is complicated, and we’re so wrapped into the blanket of self-mythology that maybe none of it is true. I have heard that someone on my mother’s side was exiled from France, for being a thief (but maybe also an insurrectionist?!?) and landed in Quebec in the late 1500s; I’ve seen photos from my father’s side that go back to the early 1900s of my great grandfather Pedro, serenading my great grandmother Elizabeth. Pedro was beaten up in a bar fight and died in 1933, supposedly, due to jealousy at his success and beautiful wife. Who knows if any of this is true. According to the family oral tradition he was born on Hopi land. I can verify none of this. But my skin is most definitely brown.

The most amazing way to celebrate America, I discovered that day, is to go to a plaza, in one of the oldest Spanish towns in The U.S., and spend the day eating elote and drinking plastic cups of Budweiser, while dancing to conjunto with two girls, laughing about their chanclas and the sounds of accordions and bass and snappy synthesizers and laughter and gritos filling the hot summer air, and everyone is twirling and smiling and older ladies are dancing with younger men, and no one cares that you have green hair and can’t dance and have no idea where your past is.

Border music. I’m not interested in the heartland. Sorry.

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