My little brother is fourteen years old. He enjoys playing video games. He sleeps in too late on the weekends. He doesn’t like volunteering, and I attest to my own hypocrisy when I say I do not want his story to end like Brandon’s. My little brother-- Kevin-- is young and brown, and I know too much about this country's dangerous habits to assume he is considered safe. I have read enough about the young brown and black boys who were never given a chance, the brown and black bodies who had cell blocks and graveyards marked for them from the moment they were born. For Latinx people, for black people, maneuvering around in this country is like maneuvering around a mine field-- often, it’s a waiting game. Often, everything comes crashing down.
In her piece, “You don’t know how much he meant: Deviancy, Death, and Devaluation,”" Lisa Marie Cacho tackles the emotional turmoil that accompanies the criminalization of Latinx bodies, through a personal anecdote about the unforeseen death of her cousin, Brandon. Cacho explains how too often, “value is not ascribed to the lives and deaths of young Latino men.”
Brandon Jesse Martinez dies on March 24, 2000. In the aftermath of his death, his own family struggles to explain why Brandon’s life meant something to them. They struggle to compile a traditional list of accomplishments for his eulogy; they cannot talk about his college friends or long-term colleagues. They cannot refer the community to his favorite charities or the homeless shelters he volunteered at. They scramble to attest for him, because Brandon walked a path along “deviancy.” Brandon was considered a “bad kid.”
Cacho explores the criminalization of Brandon’s life by comparing the aftermath of his death with that of a white-counterpart. Cacho explains that through the coverage of the two stories, it is obvious that Brandon’s death is “not-loss,” and it’s “not-tragedy,” because the journalists who report on him do so through a lense of “explicit not-caring.” In the media, Brandon is described as an “individual,” and his case is reported on the local crime segment of the newspaper. In contrast, Michael Darr-- who also dies while under the influence-- is described as a local hero, as someone worth missing, and his friends and family get the opportunity to testify all the ways Darr contributed to their happiness.
After her grief, Cacho was able to identify the coded value inscribed into both of these stories. The problem lies with the fact that Brandon’s story was not given value. Public sympathy was not just blindsided, it was outwardly refused because Brandon was burned with the same mark of criminality so many other brown bodies also endure. Brandon strayed away from the expected norms of domesticity and respectability socialized in the US, and because of his race, the practices that are seen as normal for whites, are seen as criminal and worthy of discipline for people of color. Because he was Latino, it was easy to write him off as another bad kid, amongst the hundreds of other bad kids, who get what is coming to them. Brandon was a victim to systematic erasure, to calculated dehumanization, and I know enough about that to be terrified for my own family.
In her book, Ann Cvetkovich, stressed the importance of attesting--and archiving-- accounts of trauma that belong as much to the private sphere as they do to the public one. Cacho recalls that after Brandon’s death, his “archive of feelings,” took the shape of t-shirts and road-side candles. She said that after those visual representations were gone, there was still so much left unsaid; the archive they created for Brandon was temporary, and they were still left empty-handed, with no packaged and signed argument they could offer to a capitalist society to redeem Brandon’s “surplus” life as worthy.
However, I argue that Brandon’s archive of feeling was rebuilt through Cacho’s writing, and it was expanded to include every Latinx person that got the chance to read about his life. Although Cacho writes about archives of feelings for the dead, too often, you can feel them when you’re alive.
Brandon’s archive is in the heart of every Latinx family. We never met him, but we will still mourn him. His archive is in the fear I have when I think of my siblings “not succeeding,” when I think of my fourteen year old brother and sometimes pray he never gives the police an excuse. Brandon’s archive is present in the way I tell my younger brothers to play along. One of them is only six years old but I correct his English pronunciation. I tell Kevin to wear pressed pants, to cut his hair, to assimilate to American masculinity so this system does not have a single reason to take him away. Race is often a performance; it is a social construct, but for people of color, not putting on the best damn show is often deadly.
Kevin, like Brandon, does not have the luxury of choice. He will have to work to earn his value, to earn a long eulogy, to earn an obituary where they actually use his name. In a capitalistic society, ruled by the codes of race, Kevin and the thousands of other Latino boys like him will have to prove their worth; they have to construct tangible reasons as to why they don't deserve to die, because the right to life is not inherently granted to them.
During the class discussion, someone said, “Let’s take race out of this.” They wanted to make the point that no one should be drinking and driving in the first place-- but the crash itself was not the issue on trial. When my white classmates talked about their uncles and cousins going to jail or meeting misfortune, I wanted to sympathize with them but in my heart, I knew they were all missing the point. Tone deaf, and always assuming their narratives were relatable to the discussion, they talked as if they knew what this fear and pain were like. Lisa Marie Cacho’s article, Brandon Jessie Martinez’s story, are not about who goes to jail, or who has an addiction, and how that impacts the people around them. This story is about a brown boy who lived his life being told he was not worthy, so then he could be told his death was deserved. This story is about a dangerous binary that makes Latinx bodies disposable. This story is about a system that will try to tell me my little brother deserved to die because he did not work hard enough, even though they will mean he was not white enough to be mourned. This story is about how I let myself play into this country’s narrative of worthiness; how on some nights I count all the reasons why I am a “good kid,” knowing perfectly well someone out there has to be deemed “bad,” so I can cling to my self-imposed tokenship.
I attest to my own hypocrisy.
I wish I could say rights and life and the autonomy of value should not be placed on a binary of worthiness, where society gets to choose who deserves to live and who deserves to die. But I can’t say that while in the same breath I become defensive about my own worthiness, about my family’s worthiness, about my brother’s worthiness. Fear has instilled me with selfishness. The author says there is no one to blame, but I know I am guilty of propagating Brandon’s dehumanization, because I am grateful it is Brandon and not Kevin. I am still counting my blessings. Fear has made me a selfish survivor.
While reading Lisa Marie Cocho’s piece on the death of her cousin, I thought about what I would write for my brother’s eulogy, for my sister’s eulogy, for my own eulogy. I thought of all the ways I could speak into the universe and convey all the reasons their lives were important; today, I’m trying to unlearn society’s definition of importance, of value. No one “deserves,” to die, and I wish I could’ve told Brandon that no one deserves to live thinking their life has no merit or purpose either. I am trying to learn that at the end of the day, our convictions should not depend on who deserves what but rather, on what we, ourselves, believe. Politics of deviance, hermeneutics of love-- I hope they can give me a better understanding so I can redefine my own story.
Comments