| |  Hazel Yolibeth Argueta with her daughter, Valeria Fernanda. Photo by Jacky Muniello | “I was always hot and sweaty,” Valeria Fernanda said. The three-year-old squirmed in her chair, her ponytail bobbing, as she described the month-long trip that began in July 2018, when she and her mother migrated from Estelí, Nicaragua, to Reynosa, Mexico. Then, turning to her mother, Hazel Yolibeth Argueta, 22, who has matching gold-flecked hazel eyes, she said, “I want to go play on the swings,” and pointed to the playground. The two were staying at the Casa Hogar del Niño shelter while they applied for asylum in Mexico. Argueta, a single mother and a second-year nursing student at the university in Estelí, found her life upended when protests, which had erupted in Nicaragua in April, turned violent. It wasn’t long before she began receiving death threats and decided to flee.  Hazel Yolibeth Argueta, 22. Photo by Jacky Muniello |
Daily life in Nicaragua during the protests was a challenge. As Argueta described, “We were in danger because my country is in bad shape; food is expensive, there are national shortages all the time, you can’t leave the house because you might get hit by a stray bullet and there is no functioning police force.” Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who was re-elected in 2006 (he served his first term as president from 1985 to 1990), has argued that early elections, which citizens have demanded, will create instability, and that the best thing for the country would be to keep him in office until 2021. In Nicaragua, presidents have traditionally been limited to two consecutive terms of five years, but in 2014 the Nicaraguan National Assembly approved changes to its constitution to allow Ortega to run for a third term. In addition to cracking down on press freedom and freedom of expression during his time in office, in April 2018, Ortega decreed social-security reforms that would have increased taxes and decreased benefits for a population that was largely living on the edge of poverty already. In response, senior citizens and students joined forces to protest in the streets, and eventually, pro-government paramilitary forces responded with violence. By August, pro-government forces had killed over 300 students around the country, including some still in elementary school. The government has tried to dissociate itself from the violence by saying that those who have killed students are civilians, but students and other protesters believe that only the government could afford to train and hire snipers, and would have the motivation to do so, to quell protests.  Photo by Jacky Muniello |
When I traveled to Nicaragua shortly after interviewing Argueta, I met with some of the 400 Mothers of April whose children had been murdered or disappeared by pro-government forces. Josefa Esterlina Meza, 55, is the mother of Jonathan Morazán Meza, 21, who was shot by a sniper at a protest in May. After Jonathan’s murder, she sent her eighteen-year-old son to Costa Rica, where he would join some 23,000 other Nicaraguans fleeing violence. Meza stayed in Nicaragua to fight for justice, to march with the other mothers. “I'm not scared. Because if [Ortega] is going to kill, he will always kill people, because he is a murderer,” she said. “And even if he kills 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 or 100,000 people, he can kill, but he can’t kill everyone.” When I interviewed Jacqueline Valdivia, 41, the mother of Christopher Nayrobi, eighteen, who was a student in León, she described how the police illegally detained him for protesting. “We are being repressed for expressing our views,” she said. “They want to silence us. And my son doesn’t like that.” At the time of our interview, she had traveled to Managua to request that the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights help get her son out of detention before he was tortured, as so many students have been. When citizens like Meza and Valdivia, led by students, began to protest in April, Argueta was busy working full-time at a casino and studying at the local university. Her friend and fellow student Franco Alexander Valdivia (no relation to Jacqueline), who did participate in the marches, was shot in the head by a pro-government sniper. Shortly after Valdivia’s death, Argueta, who lived with her mother, began to receive threats. “They wrote my name on a piece of paper and the name of my daughter,” she said of the first threat, which was left inside her mother’s home. Argueta believes she received the threat because she was friends with Valdivia. Later, someone left a wooden cross in front of the house, which Argueta described as the way pro-government forces mark houses whose inhabitants would be murdered.  Hazel Yolibeth Argueta with her daughter, Valeria Fernanda. Photo by Jacky Muniello |
Argueta decided to take her daughter and flee to Mexico in hopes of reuniting with her father, who lives in Puebla. To leave Nicaragua, she needed written permission from Valeria’s father, but, in a rush to flee, she didn’t get it. She fled, worrying that her daughter would not be allowed out of the country, but the two managed to escape and travel by bus through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Argueta’s mother initially decided to stay in Estelí but later fled to Honduras, after she found the words “more bullets, more bullets” painted on her house. When Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and I attended a march organized by the Mothers of April on September 2, 2018, in Managua, we saw a city in chaos, one in which citizens young and old protested en masse, shutting down the streets despite the very real possibilities of being shot, beaten, disappeared, or jailed and tortured. As the mothers marched, they carried poster-sized photos of their children in the air.  Hazel Yolibeth Argueta with her daughter and two other migrant children. Photo by Jacky Muniello |
“What we want is peace,” Argueta said, sitting near the playground in front of a mural that featured the tiny handprints of children who had stayed at the shelter in Reynosa. “Nicaragua is beautiful, but unfortunately it has become a country at war,” she explained. Later, when I walked back to the dormitories where mothers and their children stayed, I caught sight of Argueta standing in front of the dorm-room window, which was covered in pink metal bars, tenderly fixing Valeria Fernanda’s ponytail as two other migrant girls, both eight years old, gathered around. Although Argueta had reached the US-Mexico border, she made it clear that she had no plans to request asylum in the US. Aware of President Trump’s continued policy of separating migrant parents from their children, she said, “My daughter and I have never been separated. I would resist anyone who tried to separate me from my child.” With the help of the staff at the shelter in Reynosa, she was requesting asylum in Mexico in hopes of being reunited with her father. “I didn’t finish my studies, and that weighs on me, but fleeing my country is better than death.” Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and translator based in Mexico City. | | | | |  Illustration by Sloane Leong | I had a breast reduction when I was sixteen. It was definitely the move. I’m only five foot two and not all that big in circumference, and I was just a friggin’ kid when my boobs decided to become large enough to leave even a woman twice my scale generously endowed. My mom confided in me that she thought it was the Oven Stuffer Roasters that did it. The ones with the little golf tees embedded in them that would pop out when the chicken’s time had come. The ones with all that juicy breast meat. “The hormones,” she’d whisper, as if someone from the national chicken council might be listening to us in our kitchen, and they mustn’t know we were on to them. Shhh, the hormones. I mean, it was definitely the hormones. Namely the estrogen that my body was pumping out like some kind of titty factory. They’re also the very same chemicals that have endowed me with soft skin, a sultry voice, and curves that’ll put your eye out (if I do say so myself). I’m capable of saying all this self-aggrandizing shit about myself now, but back then I was convinced that no one would ever really see me and my soft, fiery, naked little heart, protected as it was with all my ample padding. I developed the unconscious habit of slumping my shoulders forward to deemphasize my breasts, which left my posture in the shape of a collapsing star. I know that’s a dramatic way to put it, but I’m a dramatic sort of person. I once wrote the droll little simile “breasts like albatrosses” somewhere in my notebook, when my English class read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” because I WAS PROBABLY BORED OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND and composing marginalia to survive. (I reread the poem for the purpose of writing this essay, and I have to say, Coleridge had bars. Sorry I misjudged you, Samuel!) But true to “Rime,” I felt at the time that my tremendous breasts were a cosmic consequence I’d carry around my neck forever as I floated alone on an eternally becalmed sea, surrounded by water, dying of thirst. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve what felt like punishment, but I knew enough to suspect that it was just the kind of quotidian betrayal that the pubescent body specializes in — like a caricature artist at a bar mitzvah, it takes that one thing about you and inflates it to a comic proportion that you’re supposed to just accept with a penciled-on grin, a party favor. I would take baths that lasted for an eternity. You know those statues of the Virgin Mary in her little blue grotto, all melancholy and serene? If you were to lay one of those statues on its back — that’s how I felt (and still feel) when I’m in the bath. I took refuge there. Floating for hours was my small act of protest against the gravity of my body. I basically lived in the tub, soaking and dreaming and writing little poems and magic symbols in the steam on the glass. It became a sort of temple, and I its prune-fingered priestess. The bath was the one place where I felt like my true self and not someone trapped inside a cartoon drawing of a “sexy lady,” a figure I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. It was the one place I didn’t need to censor my body by covering it in giant sweatshirts. It was the one place where I was safe to be just as hot, naked, and soft as I actually am, without getting dragged into whatever fantasy people have when they see large breasts on a small girl. In the bath, my thoughts would float into the steam and sink underwater into deafness. I spent so much time there, I think my mom was afraid I’d Ophelize myself. When she suggested the idea of a breast reduction, I think I probably just nodded and cried. I was clearly drowning in estrogen, suffocated by my own pendulous breasts. She brought me to a ton of doctors and had it deemed a medically necessary procedure so that our insurance would cover it. I have always really appreciated that, but as an adult I understand it in a whole new way — I mean, I could barely handle the paperwork for my son’s summer camp. When I went in the pre-operating room before surgery, the doctor drew on my breasts with a magic marker, and that was really interesting because I had never until that moment had occasion to leave my body. I was like, So, this is astral projection. Wow! Good thing I’m not in that body, because some strange man is doodling on it with a goddamn Sharpie. Next, two nurses and an anesthesiologist took over, my body horizontal as they hovered above me. One of them said in a Russian accent, “Your name is Mya? Many, many girls in my country are called Maja!” And then the next said, “Oh, in Israel we have lots of Mayas, too!” And before the third chimed in with her tale of Maias near and far, I got “It’s a Small World After All” stuck in my head and I couldn’t wait for them to knock me out already. I was fourteen pounds lighter after the surgery. When I stood up, I vomited and passed out on the hospital floor. My mom said, conspiratorially, “If anyone ever asks about the scars, tell them you were in the war.” I was sixteen, and it was 1997 — which war? The Cold War? Vietnam? I asked her about it recently, and she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about either. Shhh, it’s just the war. The body war, the women’s brigade, the titty regiment. The healing process took a long time, but don’t it always? And if I’m being real, it’s ongoing. I realize now that my habit of running a bath and holding court there during house parties in college was just one of the unsubtle ways I’ve tried to make space for my private, most holy self to exist with other people. These days, I’m basically a nudist. I joined the Y, but not for exercise — for the naked sauna. I’m a devotee of hot springs. I nursed my baby in public, so at a certain point in my life I was whipping my breasts out every ten minutes, no matter where I was. My reduced breasts reflect who I am pretty accurately. They’re witch’s tits: they’re scarred. They’ve stretched and shrunk. They’ve provided sustenance to a whole human being. And somehow, magically, they remain kind of cute. Mya Spalter writes nonfiction about witchcraft and poetry about science. | | | | |  Illustration by Osheen Shiva | Name: Lupe Valdez Age: 71 The Race: Governor of Texas Making History: I would be the first lesbian and first Hispanic governor of Texas. The Challenge: I’m the eighth child of migrant workers. I grew up in the poorest neighborhood in San Antonio. But because of the quality public education that I got, I had doors opened for me that otherwise would’ve never opened. I’m running because I know what it’s like to have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet. It was not until I got jobs that provided health care, a living wage, and sick leave that I was able to concentrate on a better quality of life. We as public servants need to be able to provide the same type of opportunities for others. The Best and Worst Advice: The best advice I received was from a pastor who wanted me to help introduce Spanish into services. I was so nervous to read in front of the congregation, but he told me, “It’s not your fault they don’t understand another language. It’s not your fault that they don’t understand you. It’s their fault. Just go ahead and be yourself.” He never realized how powerful he made me feel at that moment. When I was a federal agent, there were not very many people who looked like me. It was mostly white guys. At one point, when I was in undercover school, one of the managers came down from DC. This was around the time when women were starting to get into management, and the gentleman from DC told the rest of us in the class, in no uncertain terms, that he would “never take orders from somebody who has to sit down to pee.” It was so humiliating to be there when he said that. I remember thinking at that very moment, If I should ever be in a position of management, I will never want anybody to feel the way I just felt. Most Powerful Political Memory: I had a friend who was one of the first Latinos to be a school trustee in the Dallas area. He was also a gay man. As someone who shares similar identities, seeing his leadership was inspiring. Real Talk: Women running for office choose to swim upstream. To stand up for injustice in public, to challenge the boys’-club dynamic, you’ve got to have stamina. You’ve got to have resistance. Meena Harris is the founder of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign. | | | | |  | Sometimes I wonder what it means to be an empowered autistic woman. Not a “genius,” not “disabled,” just empowered. Fulfilled. Happy, even. There are so few examples of what this looks like in the public eye. The autistic community is very closeted, and very misunderstood. We don’t have flamboyant street parades celebrating our way of life, or revolutions and protests on behalf of our needs. Our sensitivities and preferences are still seen as things to cure, conceal, or change. We’re a burden until we act like other people and see things the way that they do. Yet only through saying no to other people’s ways of doing and seeing things have I felt the taste of liberation and empowerment as an autistic woman. Prior to this, I lived in a constant state of overextension and exhaustion. A friend once said to me that when we first met, I was like a startled ostrich. I would frantically orient myself around understanding other people and helping them to feel more at ease in my presence. And this involved more than just saying “please” and “thank you” at the right moments, utilizing particular body language, and looking them in the eye when talking to them. While all of this took work, hiding the extent of my otherness took a lot more. Performing social niceties is nothing compared to concealing my way of thinking, feeling, and processing information. In order to fit in, I learned to say no to all of my natural instincts, desires, intuitions, and preferences, because I sensed that they were different from those of the other people around me. The toll of doing this was immense. I had an ongoing private struggle with adrenal fatigue, anxiety, depression, disordered eating patterns, obsessing, overanalyzing, irritable bowel syndrome, trying in vain to control everything, suicidal ideation, rage, resentment, frustration, and sorrow. It seemed easier to harm, abandon, and judge myself than to allow others the chance to harm, abandon, and judge me. Even when I wanted to say no, I didn’t. Although “no” was my first word as a baby, I quickly stopped using it. I’m a logical creature, and I worked out pretty fast that saying yes and allowing others to do as they please — regardless of my own thoughts or feelings about it — made them more relaxed around me, and my social security seemed to be guaranteed. I rarely ever held others accountable for their actions, questioned their motivations, or asked them to change their behaviors. I took what they said and did at face value. I apologized first, and readily asked for forgiveness. I did everything that I could to like what they liked, do what they did, and say what they said, so that I wasn’t perceived as a threat — because being different is threatening. It’s seen as dissenting from the tribe, and many people don’t have the emotional, mental, and spiritual infrastructure to accommodate for differences in others. So when we embrace our differences, we may find ourselves being left out, seen as rude, or labeled as disabled. It can feel frightening and alienating. Initially, I explored my otherness through fashion. People acted like they were comfortable with this. They even seemed to idolize my calculated displays of eccentricity, and the way I would shamelessly run around in hot pants and sequins and spill glitter dust everywhere. It wasn’t an issue, because I was still playing by the rules. I went to brunch and coffee dates, left parties arm in arm with my girlfriends, promptly replied to texts, and carefully crafted what I would share on social media. Yet all of my energy was still going toward abiding by the laws of what our culture calls connecting, and it was at the expense of my well-being. I had reduced myself to the status of a prop in the mise-en-scène of other people’s lives, and I felt out of alignment, resentful. I realized that if I wanted others to care for me, it was my job to become aware of — and accept — what it took to truly care for myself. So I completely changed my relationship with communication. Because the reality is that I spend hours, days, weeks, months, and in some cases years processing the interactions that I have with people. And when I watch them eating, texting, driving, emailing, thinking about other things, getting touchy-feely, having the TV on in the background, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, checking other people out, dancing, shopping, exercising, casually scrolling social feeds, and answering phones while supposedly connecting, I feel horrified and overwhelmed. Now I’ve essentially become a one-woman wellness center. I moved to the country with my boyfriend a few years ago, and I started putting extensive self-care rituals in place. I refuse to glaze over the energy that it takes to meet up with someone, see my family, or attend a meeting or a big event. I do tarot readings to get a sense of the occasion because it gives me an anchor that verbal communication never does. I dry-brush my body, soak in the tub, meditate, and exercise to let off steam, because being anxious about social situations builds up a lot of tension, which I need to release. And I’ve found that these anxieties have less to do with being an anxious person than they do with being an autistic person. When I walk into a room of people, I’m in the void. I have to suspend myself in a reality that isn’t mine, and somehow find a way to feel safe in it. A family member once regaled to me her own experiences with social anxiety. “Oh, once you get there, you always feel better,” she said, and “You’ll be glad you went afterwards.” Unfortunately, this logic doesn’t apply to me. To cope with a social situation, I have to accept that it’s not going to feel natural or easy. I’m wired differently from other people, and that’s not going to change once I sip some champagne or see a friend I didn’t expect to be there. Now I spend a lot of time in my own space. I feel at peace there, and it enables me to look forward to being in other people’s spaces. Through taking refuge in the sanctity of an environment that I’ve created, I can build up the courage that I need to ride the waves of what I don’t understand and cannot predict in social situations. And I no longer pressure myself to be the same as others. Certain friendships fell away when I embraced my uniqueness, yet their absences freed up time and energy for the friends who have room for me and my otherness. Which doesn’t really feel like otherness anymore — it’s just who I am. I’ve become everything that I’ve said yes to: I’m not a montage of other people’s ideas about the best ways to live and communicate. My days and nights might not involve meeting others’ social expectations — but they do involve living the life of a happy and empowered autistic woman. Madeleine Ryan is an Australian writer learning that her first novel will tell her when it’s finished, and not the other way around. | | | | |  Illustration by Kimberlie Wong | I’m in Sedona, Arizona, where today’s psychic gazes at some point across my right shoulder, la-la-la-ing to herself. She is a young woman with long hair, in a loose cotton dress. The other psychics I’ve seen in my West Coast psychic quest have been surprisingly suburban. Coiffed, scarved, in department-store dresses, they collectively put me in mind of a principal at a mildly hip elementary school. This one — Mari — would have looked at home at Woodstock. Her la-la-las trill out as I ask her questions. My main question has to do with my grandmother, who is long dead. I’ve been visiting psychics to see if I can find her. “I see her,” Mari says, still rapt by whatever it is that sits above my shoulder. “The most important word to her was ‘freedom.’ She cared about her family but cared a lot more about traveling. And she had some kind of second sight.” All of which is, remarkably, true. Mari also tells me that my husband and I cut off money from a member of our family, which we’d just, days ago, had to do. It’s upsetting, she says. We wonder how he’ll do without our financial support. Which is pretty much the theme of every conversation my husband, Bruce, and I have had in the last forty-eight hours. Mari mentions that Bruce and I once went together to a haunted place called the Hay House. At this point, she’s so accurate, I’m giddy. I’ve seen multiple psychics before Mari, and watched them cast around and flounder, giving me a milk-and-cookies version of my grandmother before backtracking. And I’d chosen to visit Sedona — the capital of New Age — in the hopes that, with all of its crystals and energy spirals and aura readings, I’d find a psychic who seemed worthy of the name. The previous psychic I saw was a middle-aged blond named Julie. Julie threw her head back dramatically when considering my questions (I had paid for three, at fifteen dollars a pop, and written them out on little cards). Then she said, with a squinched-up face, stuff that must have sounded likely to be true, but wasn’t: Your grandmother just doted on you, didn’t she? She was a warm, loving person, wasn’t she? Um, no. Well, Julie said gustily, she wanted to be a warm person. By the time I found Mari, I’d spent a year visiting psychics in search of my grandmother, May. May believed in spirits, conducted séances, and practiced table-rapping, using my mother and her other children as séance partners. My grandmother spoke most often to a spirit named Simon, who rapped on the table she used for this purpose: two raps for yes, one for no. May told me, and my mother backed it up, that the Simon table would sometimes express itself by flinging itself across the room. The best way of finding May, I reasoned, was to see if she could let me know of her presence through a psychic or a medium. Not that I began this quest really believing in such things. At most, I was willing to be convinced. Why do this? After my mother’s death, in 2014, I decided that I needed to speak to my grandmother, or at least experience her, again. She was the strongest and most independent woman I’ve ever known, worlds apart from my quiet, timid mother. May liked her family well enough, but, as Mari pointed out, she loved the rest of the world more. She had a fierce drive to travel, to try everything, even if it meant staying in an Amsterdam brothel, as she once did, because the room was cheap. She smoked opium cigarettes. At 79, she trekked across Kenya. Her appetite was for life, for experience, for living wholly. I lacked her ferocity but had inherited her restless spirit. I was a high-school dropout with a drug problem when my grandmother and I had our most intense conversations. She told me about what she termed her “metaphysics,” which amounted to the mind’s power over the physical world. She taught me about our ability to transcend the body, by which, I can see now, she meant her gender. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, she lived as few women of her generation did. She told me the mind was everything and that it never ceased to exist. As I grew up, kicked drugs, and finally went to college, at a newly sober twenty, May, with her astonishing lack of fear, became my guide. If existence never ends, I felt, I could always change the terms of mine. After my session with Mari, at a New Age emporium loaded with crystals, I drift back into the store. Reading the signs, I learn these crystals can do things like realign my chakra and my heart and my uterus, or, if that’s not enough shifting-around of my innards, I can buy a chakra-balancing spray. Or purchase some shungite, a Russian mineral that protects from the harmful rays of Wi-Fi signals and laptops. Shungite is all over the place here, though the store has Wi-Fi, and plenty of salespeople tap furiously into their phones. I hunt through the store for a crystal necklace. I choose one that has different-colored stones falling like an ambling river. I spend almost $200, which is the most I’ve ever spent on jewelry. A slip of paper says the piece will bring out my beauty and my wisdom. As I loosen the chain from its neck-like holder, I am ready to accept anything. The reading with Mari leaves me caught up in a bender, drunk off my newfound belief. The day before the visit to Mari, Bruce and I took a vortex tour through Sedona. Vortexes are “energy centers,” sites that gained their status during 1987’s Harmonic Convergence. The concept of the Convergence spun out of an unusual and confusing alignment between the solar system and the Mayan calendar. Thousands poured into Sedona to meditate together and seek energy from designated sites, all in the service of ushering in a new period of planetary peace. The vortex tours are supposed to fill you with this energy. And to make your psychic self, as I understood it, receptive. Our guide was blond and conservatively dressed. I’d imagined being picked up in a 1960s van — maybe something like the psychedelic van in Scooby-Doo — but she pulled up in a dowdy sedan. I was back with the mildly hip principal again. We didn’t feel any energy. The guide told us not to worry about it. And then she asked us if we noticed the Hindu god Ganesh looking down on us, in the guise of an elephant-headed rock? We did not notice Ganesh looking down on us. The only notable thing we saw that day was a bearded man at one vortex site. He wore a loincloth and had chained himself to a tree by a hook through the septum of his nose. I’m still not sure how I felt about Mari’s reading, after that first intoxication wore off. She seemed to see my grandmother, but did that mean my grandmother was present? I can imagine May flitting through the afterlife as she had done this world, wanting to see everything, never touching down. It was perhaps enough to know that her ferocity and strength were still visible. I have not seen any psychics since that reading. I may go again, but the quest seems less urgent now. I have a necklace, and a sense that maybe May was right: the universe, like her, is greedy, and hates to let things go. Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of A Mind Apart, Body Toxic, and Make Me a Mother, is currently completing a book about the search for her grandmother. | | | | | | | | |
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