Hello friends. We took two weeks this Summer and pulled $4k. That money will pay rent for three families who were assaulted by masked thugs. Action. Focus. In the coming weeks we will post receipts for donations to the families on this website. If you bought or sold something in the auction, you will receive emails in the coming weeks regarding your shipment. Thank you everyone who hung tough these past six years.
My niece is half Mexican, that half has lived in San Diego County since the days of Pio Pico. The other day she asked me, “Auntie Meese, what’s a Barrio?” When my great grandparents landed in Boston from Naples on the ship Romanic at the start of the 20th century, we were met with racism, xenophobia, and violence. Helping to build and preserve the North End as one of the first Little Italy neighborhoods in the United States, our family founded a small grocery store becoming the hub of our block for generations. We married up and got lighter skin. We moved to the west coast in the 1980s. I was the first native-born San Diegan in my family. We’re our great grandparents’ dream realized.
While people who don’t take the time to learn the history of revolutionary struggle scream about what ‘white allies’ shouldn’t do, alienating Euro-American comrades who share similar generational struggles, I reflect on the largest lynching in US history, perpetrated against Italians who were being illegally detained in Louisiana. The frame-up job against Sacco and Vanzetti and the countless other innocents; the Triangle Shirtwaist fire; the complicated place Italian Americans found themselves in during the bussing campaign in Boston. I consider how public school history books don’t tell my kids that 3000 innocent members of the “Mediterranean Race” were swept up and interned alongside Japanese and German Americans during WWII, at the same time our full-blooded, first generation Italian ancestor fought against fascists in the Pacific Theatre as a US Navy sailor on the USS Bellauwood. I’m encouraged by examples like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, also left out of the history books, who left everything behind in Italy to face the racism in this country and help not only her people, but all immigrants in the US. Italian Americans, many looking like the white halves we married up into, enjoy privilege that was earned off the backs of the people who took over as sharecroppers when slaves fled the fields.
Why the history lesson? Because we forget. We forget the US racist playbook and we turn on one another. For my family, culture was forgotten too in many respects. The embarrassment and shame of first generation children passes down to their kin and we whiten up. Artists in Solidarity has made a point to focus our efforts on ALL immigrant diasporas in the United States since our founding in 2020, but this year we focused on three Mexican-American families. Why? We admire La Raza. Your pride, your jealous protection of your culture. As Italian Americans on the west coast, we don’t get feast days and parades anymore. Little Italy in San Diego? Faggettabout it. What a joke. Italian culture is beyond gentrified in the United States. Do we see the same fate for the barrios and Mexican-American culture? Without question.
As an Oceanside nonprofit, when local families got attacked we had to respond. The coincidence of their ethnicity is by design: kidnappers are racially profiling their victims. Oceanside is a melting pot, but these recent attacks against the Mexican-American community made me reflect deeply on the relationship between my family’s roots and my physical roots.
The difference in the struggle between my ancestors and theirs starts here: Mexican Americans are NOT immigrants. The border crossed them. While my ancestors call me in whisps of gentle breezes from the far-off Napoli coastline, Indigenous and Mexican Americans have actively watched their landscape lock down as an invading government pushed them out, choking on the smoke of a burning heap. Homeowning whites are experiencing a similar feeling as neighborhoods become gentrified. How can a culture survive when they’re colonized out of their homeland? Echoes from Gaxa and every colonized nation. We take action. As a San Diego Native, I recognize that the Indigenous and Mexican culture of our homeland are the heart, soul, and bloodline of this place. Flavors of late-comers like my family add to the special sauce. All San Diegans should be as invested as la raza in the fight for self-determination and autonomy in our region. The history of the military industrial complex, for profit prisons, and corporate-manufactured housing crisis in this county are proof positive that our region will continue to be r*ped for her resources if we let leaders have their way.
I reflect on these truths, as I realize I’m as Iroquois as I am Italian, as I sit at a table eating with Mexican neighbors and feel an uncanny sense of home. The same feeling I feel at my Italian family’s table. We get the same question when we show up at Las Colinas in county blues: “are you in the mafia?” Our fucking flags are practically the same. We’re proud and we have a historical shared revolutionary struggle. The information superhighway has opened up a new world of research and we’re all learning more about who we are, who we want to become, how we’re the same.
That information access has become our downfall. Why are we trying to prove something, and to whom? Why are we wasting our time curating a reel that nobody’s going to watch instead of taking real action? Big Mother is signing off of social media. We’ve given our comrades access to secure communication channels to stay in contact. The pressure of mass media to convince the people they’re being “creative” by revealing sensitive information to corporations has habituated the masses, making us sloppy. Social media has cranked up the competition machine, and individuals are marketing themselves for… we don’t know. Pennies on the dollar. For the real ones who are interested in direct action as opposed to performance, we want to work with you but not through platforms that collect data for corporate and government surveillance.
Platforms we’ve vetted for secure internet operations: CryptPad, Protonmail, OsmAnd and Firefox. To our fellows staying active in the cause: please stop using G**gle and if you must have people sign up use a secure storage solution like CryptDrive. If you’re planning physical gatherings of people, use secure comms to give people location details. Don’t set your neighbors up like sitting ducks. Social media platforms like the ones you post on are not safe spaces for expression. They’re corporate owned government puppets. Real art making is more fun anyway, isn’t it?
In solidarity,
Marisa DeLuca
President
Artists in Solidarity