Tag Archives: Texas

Finding God in Texas

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This is a continuation of my previous post on Canadian, Texas. The first part can be found here. *Names in this blog post were changed.

I struggled to sleep last night thinking about how I would write about my time in Canadian, Texas, and then Austin, Texas. The original title of this blog post was supposed to be “Making the Lone Star State a Little Less Lonely,” or some similar play on the state’s nickname. I was going to write about how much fun I had watching my friends Thomas* and Paul* film, how after hours and hours of watching them set up lights the first day, the second day where we drove around Canadian and got shots of everything from the town to Paul’s family’s orchard was really fucking cool. And while all of that is true, the more and more I’ve thought about my time in Texas, the more and more I’ve realized that it’s left me haunted—not even by existential questions, per se, but rather existential feelings and discomfort that’s difficult for me to put my finger on.

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Beekeeping

Canadian is a small town filled with dust and trees and kind people and Christians and an overwhelming sense of community. But that’s to be expected of a Panhandle town with a population of 2649, although the trees are maybe a bit of an anomaly from the rest of the Texas Panhandle. Time seemed to pass slower here. On Sunday, their heavy filming day, lots of local restaurants were closed through the morning and early afternoon. As we searched for breakfast around 8am, already finished with that morning’s shoot, I realized that place after place was closed, regardless of their posted hours. One bakery had a sign that read “Abrimos a las 3:30,” but shockingly, the one next door was open despite their posted hours indicating they’d be closed for at least another few hours. I was surprised to use my very broken Spanish there for the first time in many months—worse Spanish than either of my friends can speak—and the pan dulce and coffee was deeply comforting despite that not being a typical breakfast for me.

I had assumed that Canadian would be an ultra-white town, a fairly reasonable assumption on my part that made me incredibly nervous. I’m a pretty fearless person, but at the same time, I’m acutely aware of my own identity as a brown, gay researcher, and I wasn’t sure how that’d play out in rural Texas. Especially coming from the incredibly diverse Dallas suburbs and then the even more diverse and queer-friendly San Francisco Bay Area, a place like Canadian wasn’t somewhere I had any cultural context for. Those concerns about looking and feeling out of place ultimately ended up being more psychological than anything grounded in my physical experience, and as it turned out, there was a pretty large Latino population within Canadian. But eating pan dulce and coffee and seeing other brown people was still deeply comforting.

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After breakfast, I watched Thomas and Paul film interviews with Paul’s dad, a hilarious man who indulged me in all sorts of stories about his family history and the history of capital within Canadian (incredibly interesting for me as a student of sociocultural anthropology). We spent time in Paul’s family’s orchard, where I became a feeding ground for mosquitos—but on the bright side, I can now say that I’ve collected bug bites from Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Oregon, and Texas. And then we drove around Canadian collecting B-roll of the town while Paul lost his hat into the wind far too many times. His love of always wearing a hat confused me since he had such beautiful hair, which is something I told him probably so many times that it became weird; I repeat it again here knowing that the odds of him reading this are pretty good, and if it wasn’t weird before, it’s probably at least a little weird now that I’ve pointed it out. (Did I mention he has really nice hair?)

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But it was in these many hours of filming B-roll—watching the sun set over Canadian and seeing the stars light up the dim night sky—where I began to realize this trip was a far more spiritual experience than I had expected.

It was such a weirdly formative experience that when we made it to Austin the next evening and we all had tacos with a different friend, he asked me what the most exciting place I had visited so far was. “It definitely can’t just be Canadian,” he joked as we all ordered our food. But I didn’t know what to say, still processing the many moments, experiences, and conversations I had that made the trip so special. Thomas quickly stepped in and asserted “Portland” on my behalf, which so many times in this past month I’ve said is my favorite West Coast city.

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I’m not a particularly religious person. I was baptized in the Catholic Church as a baby and I was confirmed at the end of the eighth grade, a standard process in my Catholic middle school, even though I find it pretty funny that anyone expects a thirteen-year-old to express any sort of true spiritual maturity or profession of personal commitment to anything at that age. Since about the age of fourteen, I had always been pretty comfortable with dissenting from Catholic moral teachings, and my Jesuit education encouraged doubt and struggle as a means toward a deeper, more meaningful spirituality. By the end of high school, I essentially abandoned Catholicism without regret—or more accurately, the Catholic Church abandoned me—for a mix of reasons, but mostly due to justified frustration with the Church’s lack of true acceptance of gay people. Pope Francis is doing a lot better, but I don’t think I can ever go back to a church that believes the love I feel is sinful and disordered.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

— 1 John 4:7-8, NRSV

Religion was a surprising topic that came up within this journey of three 20-year-old guys. Entertaining conversations about dating, love, and sex were to be expected, and those definitely filled up long stretches of our workdays in Canadian, the way-too-long car ride through Dallas and Austin, and our time lounging around in Austin the day after we came back. But it was interesting to hear about how religion affected our sexual morality and our dating and sex lives since Paul and I grew up within Christianity and Thomas grew up in a culturally Protestant environment, especially since such a big anthropological interest of mine is sex, sexuality, and sexual behavior. Thomas made it clear to me a couple times that he finds this academic obsession with theorizing about sex pretty weird—he doesn’t understand the appeal, which is honestly pretty fair—but as someone who felt fairly repressed and ashamed by being gay in a Catholic school, sex is super interesting to me. As Michel Foucault once wrote, “sex is boring”—it’s everything surrounding sex that’s interesting, such as how sex and religion play together. (As an aside, Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, the healthiest thing you can do for Jude that didn’t happen for me is radically open and honest conversations around love and sex so that he doesn’t end up with the same feelings of repression and pain that I did.)

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Sunsets over Canadian

In the long car ride back to Austin, while Paul slept in the backseat, Thomas and I spoke pretty frankly and honestly about our personal beliefs, stemming from a conversation we were having around Calvinism and predestination. He and I approach the world pretty differently: he’s a deeply logical thinker, I’m an incredibly emotional feeler, but I think our core values are fairly similar. As he explained his own religious philosophy around God, which stems out of quantum physics and ontological debates around time, I had to articulate my own religious beliefs for the first time in a long time.

I’m fairly certain that my parents and brother think I’m an atheist, but—as Thomas correctly posited—it’s probably more accurate to say that I’m spiritual but not religious. At my core, I believe so deeply that God is love. It’s something that, in many ways, I believe both literally and intuitively. I’m motivated by a desire for social justice, which is what I think is at the core of Christianity and many other religions. I don’t have any proof or evidence for this belief that I have—that God is love—but it’s a deeply intuitive feeling, something that I feel within my bones.

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Leaving Canadian

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A Buc-ee’s on the way from Dallas to Austin

I believe in God, and believe that God is love, because that’s what I experience. And while most—maybe all—experiences are socially constructed and meaning is given to them by us, it’s something that feels authentically true to me. I’ve felt God every day that I’ve been traveling. I felt God the second my friend and I saw each other in Chicago, right before we began driving up to Milwaukee and catching each other up on the past couple weeks of our lives. I felt God as I biked behind my friend through downtown Portland, stopping every now and then to take pictures of each other in front of the water. I felt God the night that Thomas and I stayed up talking about what’s been weighing on our minds for the past couple months, verbally working through the hurt and confusion that comes from moments where we didn’t feel valued by people who were important to us. I felt God as I watched Paul lean out the passenger-seat window and take video after video of the Canadian sunset, the wind blowing his hat right off his head and into the street. I felt God as I took that first bite of pan dulce. I felt God in every thank you letter I left for my friends before I went to my next destination, in every handshake hello and hug goodbye, and in every warm, fuzzy feeling that overwhelmed me as I would get on the plane and think of all the great memories I’d made and all the new memories to come.

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A Vietnamese food truck in Austin

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The philosophy section of Book People in Austin

***

Right now, I’m currently spending the day in New York City, New York, hanging out with my friend from New Jersey. (I’m actually posting this from Ladurée in SoHo.) This Sunday, I leave for Venice, Italy. If you’d like to keep up with my journeys, I post all my day-to-day adventures on Instagram and I try to write up more of my thoughts here on this blog once or twice a week.

Where the F**k Am I?

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I jolted awake this morning, opened my eyes, and saw a deer head mounted above my head. I turned to my left and realized one of my friends from school was still asleep in the bed next to me. Only one thought went through my head: where the fuck am I?

You’d be surprised how many times this has been happening over the last two weeks. I’ve been sleeping in many different places for the last two weeks straight—Milwaukee, Chicago, Menlo Park, Stanford, Portland, Dallas, now Canadian, TX—with a brief respite from the constant moving by getting to spend four nights in the same bed in Menlo Park. But since then, I’ve essentially been a nomad, traveling across the country with my one travel bag. (Bold, right?) Many days, I wake up in a different city or state, and today, I woke up in rural Texas.

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A sign in downtown Dallas near my last meal in the city for a while

One of my friends from Stanford, Thomas*, and his friend who’s also a Stanford student, Paul*, picked me up yesterday from downtown Dallas after they drove up from Austin, where they’re based this summer. The two of them are filming a short documentary on the Texas judicial system, and since Thomas was one of the students who I was following for my research project, I was planning on coming down to Austin to visit him for a few days, and then I’d get to meet Paul there.

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But Thomas threw me for a complete loop at the beginning of July, telling me that they would be going up to Canadian, Texas, in the Panhandle to get some filming done this weekend. And I was invited. I’m not gonna lie—I thought Thomas meant Canada, as in, the country north of the United States, which didn’t make sense at first because I knew the documentary was about Texas. But after a few quick Google searches, I found out that there is indeed a Canadian, Texas.

Today and tomorrow, I’m here in Canadian, a small town of under 3000 people in the Texas Panhandle, about six hours northwest of Dallas. It’s a cute town. Very flat. It has a saloon, which is pretty cool. There was live music there last night, but the second that I saw a man walk in with cowboy boots, a giant belt, and a big cowboy hat, I knew I was a little—okay, a lot—out of my element. We’re not in Dallas anymore! But that was okay, because it was all part of the experience. There is no Starbucks in Canadian (please send me a grande blonde vanilla latte ASAP), but there is a local coffee place where I can feed my caffeine addiction. Last night we had dinner at the Stumblin’ Goat Saloon and this morning we had breakfast tacos elsewhere. Tomorrow, many (most?) places will be closed because it’s Sunday.

I was pretty excited to watch Thomas and Paul set up a location today for filming, but it turns out that setting up to film is actually way less glamorous than I expected. It usually consists of me being their test dummy person as they figure out where to position the camera and the lights. I love attention so that was pretty cool at first, but then I realized I had nothing to contribute in terms of how to actually storyboard or film anything. Oops. Hence me writing this blog post while they brainstorm directions for the documentary.

On another note, this is pretty cool. I’ll be getting to see more of Canadian later as they shoot B-roll in the town, which is pretty genuinely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And this is an especially exciting start to my third year at Stanford, where my friends have now finally figured out their interests and are getting to do super cool things here at this institution. For example, filming a documentary in my home state!

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As I’ve been traveling, I’ve been thinking a lot about the end product of my research. Classical ethnographies from the early twentieth century stemming from the structural-functionalist tradition, such as The Nuer by E. E. Evans Pritchard, tended to be monographs that tried to explain how a society is structured and how it functions, hence the name structural-functionalism. But sociocultural anthropology has moved away from that, for the better, and by the 1970s, the discipline moved towards postmodernism. It began studying concepts, such as gender or the state, instead of trying to create essentializing maps of different groups of people. Ethnography became more reflexive, acknowledging the disruptive role of the anthropologist himself. One of my professors who I adore, Angela Garcia, is a medical anthropologist who taught a class I took on the anthropology of drugs. She pays special attention to ethnography writing and writes beautifully, and her book The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande is written in a way that reads more like a story than anything else, mixing in the stories of her fieldwork with her own academic theorizing.

I’m postmodern to my core, and I genuinely don’t believe that the goal is to create a defining, universal work explaining why Stanford students do what they do or how (some) Stanford students get ahead. At the end of the day, I want to highlight the narratives of others. I want to go beyond the ivory tower of academia and write something that anyone can read. Throughout these past two weeks, I’ve been gripped by people’s stories and experiences, I’ve felt engaged with people’s lives, and I think I’ve gotten more insight into the inner workings of the university that I attend and have been existing within for the past two years. I want people to be similarly gripped by the stories of others, to feel engaged, to follow this journey through my eyes as both ethnographer and subject, and to come away feeling like I gave them deep insight into the blackbox of the Stanford University undergraduate experience, especially as that relates to perceptions of social mobility. It’s a tough task, I know; I’m only a twenty-year-old undergraduate embarking on his first fieldwork experience.

When I spoke to two recent Stanford students who just earned their PhDs in anthropology, they told me that the creative nonfiction that I’m inclined towards is inherently political and inherently academic and theoretical. It’s something that I’ll have to continue wrestling with through the end of this summer and throughout the next year as I focus on writing, both while I’m at Stanford in the fall and spring and while I’m at Oxford in the winter. In many ways, the “where the fuck am I” question that I ask myself each day isn’t so much about where geographically I am throughout the country, but about where I am in my thought process as a young writer within anthropology.

And the answer isn’t coming any time soon.

* names changed

The Battle for Texas: An Anniversary

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This is Part 2 in a series about the 2014 Texas gubernatorial race, The Battle for Texas. Read “Part 1: Meet the Democrats” here.

Yesterday marked three months until Election Day 2014 in the United States, and in Texas that means a very important race: the gubernatorial race between Democratic darling state Senator Wendy Davis and her Republican opponent, current Attorney General Greg Abbott. The Texas Democratic Party has never been more energized, and as both campaigns are preparing to go into full swing coupled with the national attention on Texas politics for the first time in a long time, the 2014 race could never be bigger.

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This past month, I had the opportunity to see Texas politics up close and personal. From June 26 to July 16, I attended the University of Texas National Institute of Forensics (UTNIF), a three week debate camp in the heart of Austin. While it wasn’t explicitly related to politics—although all of us stayed in touch with big political events, especially the disappointing Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling—my journey in Texas politics officially began around the same time UTNIF started.

The Filibuster Anniversary

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The Battle for Texas: Meet the Democrats

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This is Part 1 in a series about the 2014 Texas gubernatorial race, The Battle for Texas.

Texas Capitol and flag, taken by Jon Wiley.

Texas Capitol and flag, by Jon Wiley.

On Tuesday, March 4, all eyes in America were focused on one state: Texas. People across the state cast ballots for their party’s primary election, leading to some very interesting results from both the Republicans and the Democrats. The current governor, Republican Rick Perry, is stepping down, leaving the Governor’s Mansion in Austin completely open. (As a disclosure, I personally align with the Democratic Party, and I very much hope to see the Democratic Party win this November.)

The Filibuster

The beginning of the battle for Texas really begins in June, when State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) launched a dramatic 11-hour filibuster to block extremely restrictive abortion restrictions in a special session called by the governor that would ban abortions after 20 weeks and impose unnecessarily stricter regulations on abortion clinics and doctors who perform abortions, closing all but 5 abortion clinics. To stop House Bill 2, she had to speak continuously until midnight.

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By Texas filibuster rules, she had to stay completely on topic, couldn’t eat, drink, or use the restroom, and not lean on any desk or chair. After three strikes—first for referencing the Planned Parenthood budget, second for having a fellow senator help adjust her back brace, third for referencing the Texas sonogram law—her filibuster was abruptly ended at 10pm. As the Republicans in the chamber hurried to pass the bill, Democrats challenged lieutenant governor David Dewhurst’s ruling that Davis violated Texas filibuster rules, culminating in State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte (D-San Antonio) slamming her male colleagues and a 15-minute “people’s filibuster” where a packed gallery delayed the vote to stop the bill’s passage.

Governor Rick Perry immediately called a second special session to pass the abortion restrictions, and after making its way to the Supreme Court, a 5-4 decision to not interfere with Texas’ abortion bill allowed the state legislature to set the bill into effect. The last rural abortion clinic closed within the past week.

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San Antonio Market Square: A Fiesta

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Last month, I spent a weekend in San Antonio. Only about an hour away from the capital of Texas: Austin—the city known for its eccentricity and vegetarianism, and more recently its fight to protect women’s autonomy from (an arguably) crazy governor. San Antonio, however, is an area with a heavy Mexican influence, in case the name “San Antonio” didn’t already tell you that! The entire city brims with that Latin flair, that excitement and passion that Latin cultures always have.

Even though that weekend was supposed to be my break, I felt the itching need to do something. Really ANYTHING outside of the hotel! But my curse of not being able to sit down and rest turned out to be a blessing, since the San Antonio Market Square turned out to be an incredibly vibrant place! From live music to street vendors to indoor stores selling art with a Mexican flair, how can you go wrong?

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