[Queer and Immigrant for the Holidays] Huffington Post, Gay Section

[article: Queer and Immigrant for the Holidays]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erwin-de-leon/queer-and-immigrant-for-t_b_1160393.html

————————-

1) What holidays, if any, do you celebrate?

For the winter, I definitely celebrate a combination of holidays: christmas, winter solstice, lunar new year, my partnership/pamilya anniversary and my dog’s birthday. i consider it the queer pin@y spiritual remix.

2) How do you celebrate? And with whom?

Year after year, my partner, my dog and I bust out the parols and winter tree as our humble contribution to Jersey City’s Pin@y-infused brightly lit blocks. I make an effort to gather up loving aspects of my childhood. Though, mostly holidays are comprised of chosen family rituals. My blood family and I had a contentious relationship due to my political involvement teemed with my sexuality and gender identity. Holiday gatherings supremely meant an interrogation of my hair after passing the veggies across the table, meant a tightened brow once i shared a dissenting political opinion. The perception of my gender was an interruption to the internalized racist american dream we were forced to uphold. The night would always result in ferocious disagreement after we had eaten equally as ferocious delicious food. Due to this, I was kicked out, homeless and estranged as a young person from my blood family. This has incited displacement, a painful sense of mobility and an instability that show itself during holiday time. I traverse from having safety and family being torn apart, heartbroken. This was something passed onto me by my ma, who felt her own specific loss when stuck in rural michigan and later living in Chicago. Both cities were too far from Pangasinan, Philippines and the ache of it showed. As a second generation immigrant (my ma being the first in the U.S.), I have understood there has always been grief and loss, an understanding of forced distance (via homelessness or migration) from my loved ones. This long road motivates me as an adult, to put great effort in being thankful for my shelter and home, having access to food, the people who love me and the communities who create joy with everyday social change. These activities are embraced with people who are my family in ways that have nothing to do with blood ties. I have intentional dinners with good friends whom I organize, create art, and do healing work with; mostly people of color, LGBTQ, QTPOC loved ones. Growing up, my childhood was also saturated with consumerism and gift giving that wasn’t necessarily the most critical practice. I came from a poor immigrant household, so my ma tried her best to provide what she thought an ideal american holiday, working several shifts to create a consummate christmas experience. In some ways, it operated to ease the struggles we faced by fitting in as brown and mixed people in white american rural snow-packed midwest. Despite this, my current take on gifts is to make presents with my own hands whether it be a homemade book, a letter or a delicious savory. Each gift is unique, personal and one of a kind! Another layer to winter celebrations is commemorating my partnership. We are not married and constantly question that institution, but have an enriched partnership. my partner and I celebrate our first kisses, our courting, all the ways how we have come to our romantic relationship and the ways we have committed nourishing one another and our communities—- Pin@y, People of Color, LGBTQ, etc. Added to our family adoration, we delightfully honor when we first brought home our puppy, now handsome dog, Cornbread Siopao. Cornbread has brought us closer as we co-parented this fluffy puppy thing into a helpful, well-trained, and sweet service animal companion. Another part of our chosen pamilya process involves Lunar New Year. By midnight of the New Year, we swing open all the cabinets and drawers in the house to free all the negative energy accumulated through out the months. We eat round foods like siopao to bring abundance, noodles for long life, and we close off with a huge feast of fresh and local food that I usually cook, since I am the cook of the family. Lastly, every year I light candles on my altar for ancestors and people who have passed away. Their names scribbled on paper, faces on photographs, good memories recited for remembrance. I ask for guidance and for my choices to be reflective of their integrity. Carefully, I write down intentions for their struggles, contributions and lives fully realizing I would not have any of my accomplishments, collective awareness or any reason to celebrate at all if it hadn’t been for those who’ve dared to live a legacy of compassion and justice.

3) How do you identify (i.e. Queer, LGBT, etc.)?

I identify as a queer and transgender mixed pin@y cultural worker for liberation.

*Many Thanks,

Kay Ulanday Barrett

December 21st
6:09 PM

65 notes

Workers dig at a gold mine in Chudja, near Bunia, northeastern Congo. The conflict in the Congo has often been linked to a struggle for control over its minerals resources.

Is Your Christmas Gift Fueling War?

by TRISTAN MCCONNELL

December 15, 2010

What’s the true cost of that mobile phone in your pocket?

That’s the big question human rights group Enough Project wants you to ponder this year as it urges holiday consumers to be strategic when buying electronic gifts.

At issue: whether their new high-tech items were produced using “conflict minerals.”

The mobile phones, laptops, tablets and other electronic gadgets that define our age are all made with tin, tungsten, tantalite and gold. Those increasingly valuable minerals are mined in eastern Congo — where their profits are blamed for fueling the region’s ongoing war.

A new survey urges American consumers to press electronic manufacturers to make sure that their products do not contain minerals that cause war, mass rape, murder and exploitation in eastern Congo.

The world’s top 21 electronics firms are ranked according to their efforts to make their products “conflict free” in a survey published Monday by the Enough Project, a Washington-based pressure group.

HP is the best, according to the rankings. Intel, Motorola and Nokia ranked two, three and four, respectively. Microsoft and Dell round out the top five.

At the bottom of the rankings were camera-maker Canon, electronics companies Panasonic and Sharp, and video game giant Nintendo, all of which are deemed by Enough to have done nothing.

The scores were based on the steps the companies have taken, according to their responses to a Enough’s survey and publicly available information, said David Sullivan, research director for the Enough Project.

“As the scores show, we still have a long way to go but we are pleased at the positive momentum from the companies at the top of our list,” Sullivan told GlobalPost. “The leaders have set the pace and pushed others to follow.”

Sullivan said the industry has formed a working group to coordinate their response to the challenge and added that if the companies work together they wield a great deal of influence.

“Although Congo’s conflict stems from long-standing grievances, the trade in conflict minerals provides the primary fuel for the conflict,” according to the Enough Project report, “Getting to Conflict-Free: Assessing Corporate Action on Conflict Minerals.”

All these minerals are found in large quantities in the mines of eastern Congo. The mines are controlled by armed groups that levy illegal taxes and extract vast profits that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The miners are paid meager wages and work under terrible conditions. The profits from the mining are used to buy the guns and bullets that have kept eastern Congo in a near-constant state of conflict since 1996, according to human rights campaigners.