MC Quixote

The New Cesar Chavez Part 21

It's funny that the first thing I thought when I met him was, "He looks like Cesar Chavez." As I've gotten to know him and have witnessed his trajectory over the past two years, he seems more and more like Cesar Chavez. So who was Cesar Chavez and who is David Morales? I probably know more about David Morales, so I'll start there.

I met David Morales when I was a sophomore in high school. One day I just called out to him, "Cesar, Cesar! Cesar!" It was a test to see if he got what I was getting at. He shouted right back at me, "Frida, Frida! Frida!" He definitely got the joke and we've been close friends ever since.

We still refer to each other as Frida and Cesar and nobody really gets it. Frida Kahlo and Cesar Chavez have returned to find one another and continue fighting the good fight together or maybe just to dance together. Dancing with the spirits of dead heroes.

There's this game I play where I think about heroes that have moved on from this life and ask myself, "What would they be doing if they were around today?" Sometimes I blur the lines and live out these scenarios with heroes past. The first time I did this was when my family was at a beach called Playa Azul in Michoacan. I rented a boogie board and naively just swam out to where the biggest waves were breaking. Being out there in the powerful Pacific surf gave me that feeling of the sublime, but more of the terror than the beauty, it was almost paralyzing. I had to distract myself from the overwhelming realization that the sea could just take me away.

So I made this abstraction, a game, some sort of diversion from the sensory overload of the terror of my immediate surroundings. The panic of "I'm gonna die!" And boom, I started thinking about Pablo Neruda and this poem about the ocean and then I turned it into this game, and in the game, I became Pablo Neruda.

It's a strange notion but it worked in my head at that time: I was doing what Neruda would be doing if he was around today. He loved the Pacific Ocean, and he knew it well, living in Valparaíso and Isla Negra; both amazing houses on the Chilean coast, facing the Pacific.

I think he was born before any semblance of surf culture had hit Chile, and when it did, he was older, but I know that if he was around today, he'd be out frolicking in the waves, riding the waves, playing in the surf.

So, in my game of ghost heroes, I'll do it for him. Memorizing his poems, they're inside me and so it's like he's near me anyway; so why not hit the surf for him. It seems like writers are in some ways able to pass through the time/space continuum, so why not believe Pablo Neruda is with me out in the Pacific? This game of abstraction helped calm me down enough to ride the waves of Playa Azul rather than fight against them and end up drowning.

When I made it back to shore, this surfer / self-appointed lifeguard named "Chilo" was waiting for me in the water, shouting at me above the sound of the surf, "What are doing loca! The current is too strong to be out there. Que loca y suerte!"

Back to the Frida / Caesar dance; David Morales and I do that dance; we move through high school with grace, tempered with goofy, and we're able to overcome the stigma and fear that can be overwhelming when one is undocumented.

David never hid the fact that he was undocumented. He told anyone who asked and gave some of the details. He talked about how his parents brought him here when he was eight years old.

I know some kids who went to elementary school with him and they told me he used to where this t-shirt that just said "Undocumented".  They told me he started wearing that T-shirt when he was in fourth grade and it caused a bit of a stir in the school. The principal said he shouldn't wear it and David just kept wearing it, and he'd say, "free speech" or "I've got nothing to hide." That's just the way David is, and he's probably been open and honest about his legal status all his life.