July 4th, 2006
Dear Chichi,
You are almost 3 ½ now Chichi. What a journey your birth and fatherhood has been! The day will soon come when you will no longer be a little boy. I wonder how many of the more poignant moments of your childhood and your formation you will remember. I wanted to activate my pen in order to capture some of these memories as I have lived them alongside you.
The moment when you discovered the “American flag,” or “la Bandera de Sangre,” is a lasting one for your father.[1] Like every other American, when I was growing up, I was taught to call “the red, white and blue,” “my flag” and “our flag.” This letter to you is an opportunity to reflect on why I could never identify with this nationalist sentiment. I hope one day you can read this and jot down your own reminiscences of these and other events that marked our coming of age together.
Roadtrippin’
Everyday we create and share wonderful father-son moments. We love to go for rides together. We love to pump Rage Against the Machine and Ice Cube out of my grey 2001 Mitsubishi Galant. You comment on everything you see out of my car window. You started off with “big, big trucks, red and blue” and then “Look Dada, a big, yellow school bus.” I brought you up to identify the Dominican flag, the Cuban flag, the Palestinian flag and the Venezuelan flag, which you called “el Hugo Chavez.” You are discovering the world and asking new questions everyday. My cousin Mike taught your cousin Christopher, at three years of age, to be able to identify every Patriot and Red Sox player by their uniform number. You were precocious as well, only in a slightly different way. The prism through which we see the world influences the unique worldview of our young ones! It is the earliest form of socialization, or to use an even more direct term, indoctrination, that will surely reverberate long into the future.
One Sunday at our church, San Romero de las Americas, a liberation theology congregation in Washington Heights, we were talking about solidarity and communication beyond language. You and the other children were playing with miniature Venezuelan flags we had picked up at a rally to defend this besieged nation. Your last flag snapped in two and you came sprinting out of the playroom, crying desperately in front of a room of forty activists “Papa se me rompió mi Hugo Chavez.”[2] Everyone’s heart melted because of how cute and innocent you were. I scooped you up protectively and promised you there were many other “Hugo Chavezes” to replace that one. The indispensable moments of childhood and a most apt analogy for the challenging future Venezuela would endure!
Lately you have been seeing American flags everywhere. How can you not? They are everywhere and used to brainwash us in the worst brand of American exceptionalism and nationalism. My knee-jerk response, the first time you asked me about “our national flag,” was; ‘Oh no, Chichi, that is the “bandera de sangre,” the flag of blood. And guess what Chichi, it stuck. As often happens with children at this age, they follow what they learn from their parents.
I’ll turn my attention away from reminiscing to address the question before others parents and my own family members; Why would I teach you, my three year old son, that the American flag is the ‘flag of blood?’
Meditations
Several years ago at the height of the struggle to remove the US navy from Vieques I worked in solidarity with the Puerto Rican national liberation struggle. During a UN session dedicated to the issue of Vieques — an island that forms part of Puerto Rico — protesters planned to replace the US and UN flags with the flag of Puerto Rico’s independence. A few years earlier, activist Tito Kayak suspended himself outside of the Statue of Liberty and raised the Puerto Rican flag over it. I was assigned to hoist Tito Kayak up onto the UN pole. Security disrupted our plans before we could carry out the task and 25 of us were arrested. I was the only white man or North American involved in the action. I had a Haitian flag wrapped around my head that day. Inside of the jail cell, an elder called me over and told me that the most eloquent statement on my part would have been to carry out this act of defiance but with the flag “of my own country” wrapped around my head. He expressed that the image of a North American shoulder to shoulder with Puerto Ricans in protest would be a significant expression of multinational unity. He was a former political prisoner and I deeply respected his view. I paused to reflect, was I denying a piece of who I was?
The Weight of History
The more I thought about it my son, the more unthinkable it became to imagine myself representing an American flag in any shape or form. You are the offspring of distinct realities, the Bronx, Brockton, white poverty and Dominican migration. Why would your father be ashamed and repulsed by his “own” flag? To answer this question it is necessary to review a bit of history.
- I trace part of my ancestry all the way back to one of the original families that came over on the Mayflower; John Shaw. But what I learned from a young age conflicted sharply with the family legend. Outside of school, I learned that April showers bring Mayflowers and Mayflowers bring disease, destruction, and holocausts. When my 13th great grandfather arrived in Wampanoag land — later called Plymouth, Massachusetts by the settlers — there were more than 50 million indigenous people living in the Western hemisphere, 8 to 12 million North of the Rio Grande.[3] My 11th grandfather and the trail of European colonizers initiated a campaign of extermination that would reduce the population of the Americas to approximately 5 million by 1900.
- How many Africans lost their lives in the holocaust inflicted upon them by the European powers? Howard Zinn and other historians estimate that between 50 and 75 million Africans lost their lives as a result of the slave trade. These are the two pillars upon which the American nation-state and its flag were founded. Was I supposed to celebrate this legacy?
- The third historical event I want to highlight is the decolonization struggle that emerged throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1960’s and 1970’s. If we tally the number of deaths inflicted by US foreign policy against liberation movements in Vietnam, Mozambique, Central America and throughout the three colonized continents, serious research indicates that we approach a number beyond 10 million casualties. There are a plethora of sources that document the war against third world liberation. For starters check out the documentaries “Destructive Engagement,” “The Trials of Henry Kissinger” and “The War against the Third World.” Mamood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is also a good starting point. What was falsely called the Cold War was really a global class struggle in which millions were murdered for daring to assert their independence. Any rigorous look at history confirms this.
- The US’s did not just support regimes of repression abroad. How many of this soil’s most eloquent daughters and sons have been murdered for daring to resist and dream beyond a failed socio-economic design? Only in 1969, 29 Black Panther leaders were targeted for assassination and executed. The list includes Fred Hampton, Bunchy Carter and George Jackson among so many other freedom fighters. These are some of the most courageous and intelligent human beings to have walked this part of the earth we know as the USA. How many more fallen warriors do we add to this list when we calculate the number of members of opposition groups — like the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, the International Workers of the World, and the CPUSA — who were murdered? I wrote 365 Days of Resistance to document the sacrifices and lives of the fallen.
“Old Gory”
From a dry, objective and empirical view, “old gory” outdoes the swastika. “The flag of blood” has surpassed any symbol of death and destruction ten or twenty times over. Does all of this blood count for something? Despite our society’s best attempts at collective denial, I always sensed there was a cover up.
The American flag is unrecoverable and irredeemable. This past summer, representatives from the misnamed Communist Party USA unfurled American flags in Venezuela at the International Youth Festival. The peoples of this hemisphere saw this act as a grave insult to the dignity of the Latin American peoples and all colonized peoples. Just Latin America has been invaded and occupied more than 100 times during the 20th century by the United States. No one would ever talk about recovering symbols such as a Ku Klux Klan hood or a swastika. We are convinced that it’s up to us — the masses of everyday people — to prepare the final burial of “la bandera de sangre” and to hoist up fresh symbols of liberation in its place. Only then, can we all breath and grow freely as we are meant to.
Our Historic Responsibility
A former Vietnam veteran, S. Brian Wilson, poses the following question; “I wondered why it was okay to burn innocent human beings 10,000 miles from my home town, but not okay to burn a piece of cloth that was symbolic of the country that has horribly napalmed those villagers.”[4] This essay “What the Flag means to Me,” by Private Wilson is worth reviewing. Now here we have a true patriot! Wilson’s story is that of a naive young man who enlists in the army wanting to do good, only to learn the true motives behind the U.S. government’s ongoing wars.
Ernesto: mi hijo: I wish it weren’t so.
I wish I could fly this flag carefree little guy. But my loyalty is not to a genocidal, myth-making machine that hides behind the cloak of the red, white and blue. My loyalty is to history and to humanity. The day we take power we will not only replace this fake democracy, we will also do away with all of its divisive anthems and symbols. Anyone who identifies with this flag is delusional. I don’t blame them as they have clearly been misled but I do hope they can open up their hearts and minds. The day we achieve liberation in the imperial center, is the day we will wave the flag of all of humanity. What colors or symbols might this flag contain? What will happen to the statue of liberty and other statues or symbols of the US? That is for the people to decide. But there will be no stripes of blood and white supremacy, with 50 stars squeezed together symbolizing this prison house of nations. I think its important that we look at the Sandinista, Angolan, Mozambican flag and the Red Black and Green flag of Black liberation, among others, for examples of flags that really symbolize growth, resistance and freedom.
When we learn to step outside of our own chauvinism, we can begin to truly discover ourselves.
Indoctrination?
One of my aunts contended that the way I raise you, Ernesto is indoctrination.
Ok, I don’t contest this. We believe in indoctrinating our children… with the most serious doses of love, collectivism, sensitivity and a deep understanding of history so that we can rescue this world of ours teetering on disaster.
It is the ruling class’s form of indoctrination that we will never accept; the worse forms of greed, individualism and a selfish thirst for fortune, fame and power. When I teach you, my son, that this is ‘the flag of blood’ it is based on an all too accurate understanding of history. In contrast, these American dreamin’ patriotic parents are filling their children’s heads up with falsehoods and fallacies. The fact that today the US has 740 military bases spread across 140 different countries tells me and you Chichi that it is our responsibility to keep tearing down and stamping upon this “bandera de sangre” every time we come across it.
How interesting it will be for you to read this one day and leave your own imprint on the wide open world that lies before you!
Muchos abrazo Chichi,
I love you and the humble oppressed peoples of the world more than anything in the world.
Your old man,
Dada