I have nieces and nephews, and I definitely
don’t want them to show up in this funeral home with these issues.
So I spend a lot of time with them.
My nephew CJ is ten. My sister Tesa let him
get braids and he has the cornrows going to the back of his hair.
When she let him get the braids, I really objected to it. I said,
“Tesa, he looks like a little thug.” And she said, “Well, he’s not
a little thug.” And I said, “Well, I know that, and you know that,
but the way that he looks…”
I tell CJ all the time, “I don’t like your
braids. I don’t like ‘em at all.” So he’ll say, “Auntie Cat, I want
some new gym shoes.” And I’ll tell him, “If you cut your hair, I’ll
buy you some new gym shoes.” My sister gets mad at me because I do
that. I just don’t want him to get in the wrong crowd. If it looks
like a duck…
I’ll tell you this. I saw somebody breaking
into one of my neighbors’ houses, some young men. I knew that my
neighbor was out of town. And so when I saw those guys back there,
I knew that they didn’t belong there. I immediately picked up the
phone and called the police.
The police called me 10 minutes later and
they told me they had picked up three guys who fit the description
I gave them. The men that were breaking into the house, they had on
standard teenage stuff: red or white T-shirt, pair of jeans. So
when the police officer drove me over to where they had stopped
them, these guys were younger, but they were dressed exactly the
same. Now, if I wasn’t so certain about what I saw, I could have
said, “Oh yeah, that’s them,” when it really wasn’t.
So I told my sister that’s why I don’t want
CJ to have braids. And he’s gotten beat up a couple times. He’s
been bullied the last couple months on his way home from school,
and I told him it has a lot to do with the way he looks. That
visual is very, very powerful, so I think we have to send our kids
some other messages. There’s no way I want my nephews rolled in
here one day.
What I hear from the kids these days is that
they’re bored. And I’m sure they are bored—TV and video games,
that’s not a lot of satisfaction. There’s nothing for the kids to
do. And all you really see is them walking around, sitting on the
porch. My little nieces and nephews, they’ll say, “I’m bored.” And
I tell them, “That’s because you are bor
ing
. You’re a boring
person. What kind of interests do you have? What kinds of things
interest you?” They say, “I don’t know.” Well, you have to figure
that out.
One of the funeral staff here was telling me
about a house party in Austin. Three people got killed at the party
the other night. She said somebody turned off the lights, and two
boys and a girl were shot. And to me, they got to have more
creative things to do, you know? We got to give them outlets that
produce something else. I don’t have the answers, I don’t know what
they are, but a house party? That’s not it.
Do I believe in ghosts? No, not really. I
believe that there is a spiritual world along with the physical
world, but I don’t ever expect any of these dead people to get up
and walk around, you know? These people who have died are so
peaceful, they’re not gonna bother you. You just have to know what
you believe about dead people, and what I believe is that the dead
have no power over the living. I think of it as an egg. Your egg is
your body and you got a yolk and you got the whites. Those are the
inner parts of you. And what we’re left with at the funeral home,
what we deal with, is the shell of the egg. That’s it. And the rest
has gone on.
When I get burned out from the emotional
piece of the funeral home, I go home to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and
my mommy. It’s a really emotionally burdensome job. When you’re
drained, you’re drained. Because you have to show up, you have to
be present, you have to be there for the family. And you can’t turn
away from that.
I wonder all the time: “How in the hell did I
get here?” I never really planned to stay. It’s really the people
that keep you here. It’s an experience like no experience you could
ever have. And, a lot of people, they think it’s weird. They think
it’s strange until they’ve had the experience themselves.
Funeral directors, we’re really happy people
on the inside. I think that’s the biggest misperception, that we’re
this gloom and doom. I’ve had people say, “Why are you smiling?”
Some people find it offensive, actually. That’s one of the things
that I tell new interns and people coming on: “People are mad and
angry, but they’re not mad and angry at
you
. They’re mad and
angry that their loved one just died. And every once in a while,
one of them might take it out on you.” People who work at a funeral
home, they see just how short and fragile life is, and so they’re
happy not to be on the back table.
Don’t delay anything. Because you never know.
You never, never know. I’m happy because I got another day to live
my life. Because death is a non-discriminator. Young, old, black,
white, purple, green—it doesn’t matter.
Oh my God, I don’t even watch the news.
Violence just walks through the door every day; the news happens
here. I see what it does to people.
One of my clients comes back and we talk all
the time. Her son was killed, and she is just so hurt. She just
comes and she talks and she cries. You can’t really do anything;
you just listen. You carry the burden. Here’s a person that feels
comfortable enough with you to say some things to you that she
could probably never say to anybody else.
I try to let people have their moment. A lot
of times, they’re trying to reason it out in their own heads. I’ve
been with mothers where their children have been the victims, and
mothers whose sons are the perpetrators, and neither one of them
can understand it. Sometimes it’s like you’re talking to the same
person.
—
Interviewed by Molly Tranberg
THE SCAR TELLS A STORY
DAISY CAMACHO
In Chicago, violence and poverty go together
like bullets and guns. According to The Chicago Reporter,76 nearly
80 percent of recent youth homicides (kids killed under the age of
21) took place in 22 low-income black or Latino communities on the
city’s South, Southwest and West Sides—even though just one-third
of the city’s population lives in those areas.77 The report
concluded: “It is nearly impossible to curb youth violence without
addressing the underlying social conditions” including “limited
access to higher education [and] violence-plagued and under-funded
public schools.”
As a doctoral student in developmental
psychology at UCLA, Daisy Camacho studies the “achievement gap”—the
disparity in academic performance between kids from richer and
poorer communities. The 24-year-old Camacho focuses on the role
mentoring and after-school activities play in overcoming this
divide. As the daughter of Mexican immigrants and first member of
her family to graduate from college, she brings to her studies a
passionate firsthand understanding of the subject.
Unfortunately, Camacho also has direct
knowledge of youth violence. On Halloween night of 2009, she and
fellow DePaul student Frankie Valencia attended a party at an
upscale home in the traditionally working-class Puerto Rican
neighborhood of Humboldt Park.78 When members of a local gang tried
to crash the gathering, they were asked to leave. They returned
with a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol.79 Valencia was killed; Camacho
was shot through the neck but survived. A petite woman with
penetrating eyes and quiet charisma, she still has a small scar
under her jaw.
In the ambulance after I was shot, I kept
trying to explain to people, “Me and Frankie are not involved in
gangs; that is not why this happened to us. We go to DePaul. Yes,
we’re Latinos, but, you know, give us a chance.”
And that’s when the paramedic was like, “You
were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s just
a bad neighborhood with bad kids.”
And I was like, “No! No! Humboldt Park is not
a bad neighborhood. Why do these kid have access to guns? And why
don’t we have activities for them so that these things are
prevented?”
And, to this day, I have a really hard time
thinking about the guys who shot us. I kind of just feel like
they’re a part of some system that turned them into this, you know?
So it took me a long time to not view them as that. To view them
as, you made this choice, and because of your choice, my friend is
no longer here.
People try to say that you can do anything
you want in this country, and that there’s this American dream, and
that whatever you aspire to, you can accomplish it. And it’s true
that, for some people, that does happen. But for a lot of people,
it doesn’t. There are certain things that are not even awakened in
you because of the context that you’re in. If you’re in a
low-income community, for example, you might not have access to
role models.
Elgin, the town where I grew up, is one of
the bigger suburbs of Chicago. It’s not the most affluent of
suburbs, but you’re not living in the inner city. It’s diverse.
It’s very diverse: racial-ethnic diversity, but also socioeconomic
diversity. My parents were Mexican immigrants. They didn’t speak
English when they first moved here. My mom worked in a factory and
my dad worked in construction. And then they got their real estate
jobs, and they had their own office. And by then, we were doing
really well. I remember they bought me a car when I was 16. Brand
new. Over the years, however, more economic troubles hit my family,
due to my parents’ divorce and the market crash. Lots of times, it
felt like we were worse off socioeconomically than when my parents
raised us together with blue-collar jobs.
Sometimes discrimination could be bad in
Elgin. You would hear stories about people saying mean things to
Mexican-Americans, just very overt. Even when the animosity wasn’t
blatant, there were definitely micro-aggressions. But my parents
were like, “Sometimes people will have negative perceptions of you
because of your heritage, but you just have to keep working
hard.”
They weren’t going to settle for what society
dictates. I knew since I was very young that I was going to go to
college. They made that very clear. Both of them are very
ambitious, so if you ever said something like, “Oh, I want to be a
nurse when I grow up,” they would be like, “Well, why don’t you
want to be a doctor?” Or, if I said, “I want to be a teacher,” they
would say, “Well, why don’t you want to be a principal?” It was
always
do more
.
But I also benefited from other people
believing in me and challenging me to do better. Although my high
school was a little less than 50 percent Latino, minorities were
underrepresented in the honors classes and the after-school
programs. A lot of times, I was the only one. And I wound up in
those classes almost by accident. When I first got to high school,
I kind of got lost in the shuffle. I was taking all regular
classes, and one of my teachers said, “You should consider taking
honors classes.”
So I said, “Okay,” and I went to my
counselor, and my counselor was like, “Oh yeah, your scores are way
above everyone else’s. You should definitely be taking honors
courses.”
I was like, “Man, if that teacher hadn’t told
me, I would never have come in here.”
I also took part in a high-school program
called Upward Bound, which gave me the tangible skills you need so
that you can get into college—an understanding of how to apply and
what kind of financial aid is available and what types of colleges
are out there. I mean, there’s just so much that you don’t know
when your parents don’t go to college; it’s difficult to even
articulate it. But fortunately, there were people around me who had
high expectations for me.
It was similar once I got to college. I had a
lot of good mentors at DePaul. They recommended that I join the
McNair Scholars Program, which helps low-income and minority
students get into doctoral programs. Taking part in McNair helped
me get to different labs, get research experience, present at
conferences, things like that. At first, I didn’t know that I
wanted to get a Ph.D. I mean, it just
sounded
cool, but I
didn’t know what it was for or why you would do it or whether I
would like it. It was sort of the same thing as in high
school—people along the way making me aware of opportunities.
But how many other kids like me get lost?
Many of them are very capable, but because they don’t have these
expectations, they’re not going to rise to meet them.
I met Frankie at the end of our sophomore
year at DePaul. We were applying for the study abroad program. And
I just started talking to him, and he was like, “Oh, what are you
doing at school?” And I just told him, you know, the standard “I’m
a psychology major and I’m, you know, whatever.”
And he was like, “Oh, I want to be
mayor
. I want to change Chicago politics!”
Which was kind of cool, you know?
After the shooting, some people thought I was
Frankie’s girlfriend and blah, blah, blah. But it wasn’t like that.
He really was just a friend. We connected over family, the value of
family. We connected over wanting social change. Sometimes we would
try to do homework together. It never really worked, because we
would start talking about things that we wanted to change or wanted
to see happen. We went to a lot of cultural events at DePaul—like
oh, there’s this speaker coming, or this poet, or this
author—anything like that, we’d try and go together. And ask tough
questions and probably discuss it afterwards—nerdy fun.
Frankie was a dreamer, but he also did
things. It wasn’t just, “Oh, this is what I
think
.” He
engaged with people. He was active. He was doing things like
volunteering for an organization that helps low-income preschool
kids with literacy and other skills.80 After a while, he and I
began to share a dream about improving our education system and
breaking the cycle of inequality from one generation to
another.