Category: Current Events

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Book Reviews Central America Current Events Humanities Washington Talks Intellectuals Latin America Philosophy, World politics Talks and other events World Affairs

The Monkeys Have No Tail in Zamboanga–A Growing Up Story (a book review)

Wolfe, Reese. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959) pp. 169.

An old friend, gone by and by, wrote this wonderful memoir a few years before I met him. He confessed he was an author when we worked together, but I did not read his work until decades later. Now I’m glad I finally read this part it; it may have been his most satisfying.

The Monkeys Have No Tails is Reese’s memoir of growing up and becoming a man. He told me, when I knew him, that he had grown up in the Berkeley-San Francisco area in a well-heeled family, an assertion confirmed in this book. I discovered I was vaguely familiar with his growing up years, as chronicled here, most probably because we talked about his early life when my wife and I visited him and his wife, Dorothee, and I started learning the little matters that underpinned our work. We were cultural attaché’s in Central America, he the older, I the younger (much younger).

Reese tells us in his book that he became a man at sea. That is what this memoir is about; that at the age of eighteen he left home and made it to the old wharfs in San Francisco where he committed himself as an apprentice mariner on a rusty old merchant marine ship. He thought it was the beginning of an exotic adventure but was soon put to work cleaning and polishing the entire ship, day after day, then later shoveling coal into the steam boilers. This is how came to sail the briny blue for countless weeks. He became overwhelmed with regrets when the fabled ports of call turned out to be a big disappointment.

He couldn’t get back home quickly enough.

In between, he discovered, among other things, that in Zamboanga monkeys have no tails but more importantly he learned lifelong lessons: who he was and who he wasn’t. He admired the first assistant engineer so much that he began aping him, but soon came to terms with himself, with who he was—and to return to finish up college in Berkeley.

He writes in a light and friendly manner and includes songs he sang on the ship’s foc’sle, strumming his banjo-ukulele to ease the long days on deck.

Reese Wolfe and his daughter, Mimi.

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Book Reviews Current Events Intellectuals Nazis Philosophy, World politics Prisons in the U.S. United States World Affairs

Walla Walla Penitentiary in the 1970’s, a book review

Stastny, Charles and Gabrielle Tyrnauer. Who Rules the Joint? (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1982) pp. 234.

The authors of this book, a man and wife team, write that they were personally affected by the violent uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, in 1971, in part because they lived nearby. As professional scholars, they had previously studied survivors of the Nazi regime. Coincident with Attica, they learned of the unusually progressive changes that were being reported at the first Washington State Prison (WSP) also known as Walla Walla. Determining that these were exceptional circumstances they turned their investigative capacity to the goings on in Washington State, producing this book as a result.  

Who Rules the Joint? begins by offering a perspective on what appeared to be significant reforms at Walla Walla in the late 1970’s. One of their findings is that the prison policy revisions there in those years were among the most progressive in the United States.

To help the reader grasp the meaning of this assertion the authors review the growth of prisons in the United States. Their analysis allows them to develop a typology of “power configuration” in American penal institutions. In other words, they sort out their understanding of the application of authority in a prison and come up with the following categories: unicentric (“keepers over prisoners”), bicentric (“keepers vs convicts”), tricentric (“keepers, remediators and inmates”) and polycentric (“Mass society, Prisoners, keepers, guards’ unions, courts, legislatures, mass media, etc.”). Authority exercised by the “keepers” of a prison is most strict in a unicentric situation because the power is concentrated in one place, it is unified at the top with the wardens. At the other end of the continuum, authority is polycentric because it is spread among several actors, or in many places, theoretically, at least.

Chapters 5 and 6 contain the key findings of the study and the information most specific to Walla Walla. Spurred by Dr. William R. Conte, reform-minded administrators endorsed new ideas at a time when progressive change was rising in American society. WSP saw the rise of a polycentric arrangement of authority that endured from 1971 to 1973, a condition not seen anywhere else. A Resident Governing Council (RGC) made up of elected prisoners who could sit down with the superintendent to decide how the prison was going to be run is a remarkable example of this period. The fact that inmates published their own newspaper also stands out as a notable demonstration of inmate influence. In the chapters noted, the authors weigh and analyze the relative strength of inmate power, but they also report the decline of the experiment. The RGC was eliminated by 1979 and things returned to a more authoritarian configuration, somewhere between unicentric and bicentric. A multitude of factors intervene in the process and they are discussed in detail. The manner of reversing the “power configuration” from many points of influence to only one or two is punctuated with reports of significant violence taking place all the way to 1979.

One of the final conclusions I make is that the late 1970’s were undoubtedly the toughest years in Walla Walla for everyone concerned. Another is that penal directors at the very top along with high state officials necessarily took stock of the situation and decided to reinstate the fullest control possible.

The authors of this seemingly neglected volume include copious end notes filled with important explanatory notes and a bibliography about prisons that appears quite comprehensive up to the point of publication. I consider Who Rules the Joint? a primer for anyone beginning to understand prisons in America.

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Book Reviews Current Events immigration Uncategorized United States

A girl grows up in Brooklyn, a book review

Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: Harper Perennial, 1943, 2001) pp.493.

This book is a masterpiece of Americana, written in a heartwarming, humanistic manner. Notice that it first appeared in 1943, the best the author ever wrote, kindly and fittingly rescued from oblivion and published anew.

Betty Smith and her book

It is a tender tale of growing up in America, in Brooklyn, in the first decade of the 20th century. The life of a penurious but respectable family is narrated by Francie, the pre-teenage daughter whose understanding of herself and her family evolves during a five year span. A portrait of her beloved Irish father who would rather sing in pubs than hold a proper job is heart rending as it is earnest, as is her mother who devotedly and efficiently holds the family together even after the death of her husband.

Still, the centerpiece is Francie’s growing up into an independently-minded young woman. Early Brooklyn is also portrayed with affectionate detail, the candy seller, the local tavern, the local school, while New York City lies far away, an alien country across the river that barely enters the picture. In an afterword we learn that the novel is autobiographic.

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Book Reviews Central America Current Events Humanities Washington Talks immigration Intellectuals Mexico migration u.s.-mexico border United States World Affairs

LIVING AS AN UNDOCUMENTED PERSON IN AMERICA, A BOOK REVIEW

Marcelo Hernández Castillo. Children of the Land: A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), pp. 362.

Every American should read this memoir because it offers a real, personalized story about what it means to live as an undocumented person in the United States. Most Americans have no idea.

The author was brought to the United States in 1991 as a youngster by his undocumented parents, making him a DACA person. This means that, like his parents, he too was undocumented but received protection from deportation in 2012 from President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (hence DACA). He was one of a great multitude in similar circumstances, but different from most of them because he obtained a green card visa later, after all, as he explains.

Like most DACA folk, Castillo became Americanized to the point of losing fluency in Spanish, relying on over the counter drugs, wearing a nose plug, and even getting tattooed. And, like many of his fellow Dacas, he also achieved what most mainstream Americans do not: a master’s degree from a leading university. He does not expound on the challenges he encountered doing this, but they must have been enormous. Instead of becoming a lawyer or a doctor, he became a poet. Here are the reasons he admits for this:

I wanted to write poetry because I believed any practice in the English language would distance myself from my identity as an immigrant and I thought (naively ashamedly so) that the farthest association from an immigrant was a poet How foolish I was. Little did I know the lineage of immigrant poets I came from…(p. 75).

Then, again he explains regarding learning English:

I wanted to write and speak English better than any white person, any citizen, because in the unthinkable case of ever getting caught by immigration, I thought I would impress them enough with my mastery of English to let me go. What a stupid idea. (pp.75-76)

Castillo’s memoir is framed around the agonizing challenges of obtaining his own residential visa, then trying to get his father’s and later his mother’s. I found this part particularly gratifying because he unabashedly divulges the psychological and social strains involved. Just driving to be interviewed at the ICE offices to qualify for the visa he became fearful of committing a mistake that would get him pulled over and arrested obliterating his dream of holding a visa. Paranoia and trauma are words that he uses to describe his feelings—and those of his family. The rest of us would be better Americans if we could appreciate these experiences.

He is a poet writing his memoirs, so the biographical elements mentioned in the paragraphs above are veiled in his often florid text and fluid structure. Reading the text with care will help.

Why Castillo’s family chose to immigrate without documents in the first place is a crucial point addressed only tangentially because it is, after all, a memoir, not a history book. He works as a professional poet.

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Book Reviews Current Events Prisons in the U.S. We Became Mexican American, a book

Join Our “Mixer” for Incarcerated Latinos on FaceBook June 28, 2020

Hello everyone,

I am inviting you to join me and my fellow LDO Volunteers who support Latino prisoners in the Monroe Correctional Center (MCC) in Monroe WA. We are doing a “Mixer” on Facebook, June 28th at 3 p.m., via Zoom. Please join us.

The Mixer will offer some informational and cultural activities. I will give a brief overview of our organization (LDO) at the start and two or three formerly incarcerated Latino community members will speak of their experiences. We’re hoping for some music too. So sorry we can’t offer you something to eat and drink!

If you are interested in the general topic of U.S. prisons and/or Latinx issues (culture, history, the Latino experience in the U.S., etc.) you may find our LDO Mixer hour interesting if not beneficial (if you’re interested in the subject of prisons, see my book review of American Prison, in this same blog). The purpose of our Facebook event is to help our communities understand prison realities, attract local volunteers to help with our prison work at the MCC, compile a list of followers and invite donor contributions.

The Monroe Correctional Complex, Monroe WA

LDO refers to the Latino Development Organization of Washington Serving Latinos in the Monroe Correctional Complex. This is the name of our nonprofit organization (501c3), and I am the president. LDO includes a Board of Directors, a small corps of community volunteers, and detainee leaders representing about 40 inmates in the MCC who affiliate with LDO. We appreciate both our community volunteers and the guys inside because without their help LDO would not exist. The photo at the top of this article, taken in 2019, shows some of our LDO detainees and some of our volunteers standing in front of artwork created by MCC prisoners.

The word “development” in the title of our organization was chosen by the LDO affiliated detainees a couple of years ago in one of our meetings. They chose it because they insisted and continue to insist on developing and improving themselves to achieve the fullest rehabilitation possible.

Before the pandemic struck, our LDO organization was building, at their request, a curriculum of educational and self-improvement activities, including guest presentations, short-term classes on psychology, history, art and culture (I gave some) and so on. They had already organized themselves into mentoring groups in art, Spanish, math, etc., as testimony of their own inclination toward self-improvement. Does that impress you? Our LDO guys impress me quite a lot. In any case, we’re preparing to resume our work as soon as possible.

Hope to see you on June 28th at 3 p.m.!

Visit and like us at our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/latinodevelopmentorganization/

And our web page is here: https://www.latinodevelopmentorganization.org/