What does Los Angeles look like without the Carroll architecture?

Christopher Soto is now the living embodiment of a great poem written in Los Angeles: queer, punk, pro-immigrant, relentlessly enthusiastic, and with the unparalleled ability to turn the most political, literary issues into a backward party. Soto’s instantaneous transitory work pulse with the rhythm of spoken-word and grandcore scenes that defined the years before he grew up outside of Los Angeles. I was initially attracted to her work through Soto’s activism. Along with authors Javier Zamora and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Soto co-founded the Undocupoets campaign, which lobbied American publishers to remove evidence of citizenship requirements from first-book competitions and help a new generation of undocumented writers come to the publication.

Soto’s long-awaited debut collection, “Diary of a Terrorist” (Copper Canyon Press), takes policing and the elimination of human caching as its central mission. The poetic nature of Soto’s dissent is fresh, and the book’s stylistic avant-garde but highly relevant poems contain many critical conversations within the abolitionist movement, such as in youth prisons, immigrants at the border, trans people oppressed by airport security, and Palestinian activists in prisons. . While it explicitly calls for an end to the police state, “Terrorist’s Diary” is also inspired by tainted personal history, which finds its voice in acceptable poetry where Soto pushes the pain of experience to remind us of a more just world. Not only this, with the help of fire you can do welding there.

Soto and I talked about how California’s Carroll history has shaped and stained LA’s urban fabric, and what its ideal city would look like without police architecture.

Andre Nafis-Saheli: “Diary of a Terrorist” took 10 years to produce, and before that, you published a chapbook and a poem. I’m curious to know who your first artistic sculptures were and how they influenced you.

Christopher Soto: In high school, I remember seeing word-of-mouth poets like Sheehan and Gina Loring. It’s about the time when “Deaf Poetry Jam” was on TV. I go to A Mike and Dim Lights and Dr. Poetry Lounge in Pomona, Fairfax High School, Los Angeles. I was on a slam poetry team with other young Black, Latin, and Tongan poets who taught me words. Additional offers (I love you in Tongan). We met at our coach’s house under a railway track in Ontario, and he taught us how to modify our bodies and voices in relation to the content of poems. I will also host large dialect-word poetry readings with drumline, breakdancer and graffiti artists. I do painting and street art myself. Over the years, I have visited music venues like Odor in downtown LA where they have free haircuts and breakfasts at Sunday morning events, where you can see bands like Mika Miko for $ 5. I was a singer in the band Grindcore called Ambulance Ride, and we produced an EP.

AN-S: How do you feel as an artist has changed from the beginning?

CS: My youngest person was writing as a person and was related to interpersonal interactions. I am often preoccupied with how my poems can affect the physical reality of the world and how poetry can create more just places in an instant. There is an abolitionist geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote, “If justice is tangible, then it is always local, that is to say, part of the process of making space.” I think my old self-thinking takes writing as a communal process and is more concerned with structural violence.

AN-S: You grew up in California during the most dramatic expansion of the Carroll system. How did this affect you?

CS: As I visit my abuella tomb in the San Fernando mission, I think of how the first human cage incident occurred in the area in the 1780s when Spanish priests locked unmarried Tongwa women and girls in dormitories at night. I drive down downtown and wonder if the chain was built by gangs in the 1880s. I go to see art with friends in Little Tokyo and think about how the neighbors must have felt when Japanese Americans were forcibly evacuated from concentration camps in the 1940s. I see military equipment deployed against unarmed civilians in protest, and I remember that the first SWAT unit was created in Los Angeles in response to the Watts Rebellion in 1965.

AN-S: My favorite poems in “The Terrorist’s Diary” are “The Children in Their Little Bullet-Proof Vest”, where you discuss writing workshops for young people incarcerated in California. What touched you the most about that experience?

CS: Around 2011, I was living in Long Beach and teaching poetry to young inmates at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Detention Center in Downey. A teenage girl in prison told me that her mother would bring home abusers. She said the court did not believe her story. This teenager told me that she would try to send him back as soon as he was released from Los Padrोसnos. We were sitting at a stainless steel table preparing to write a poem together, the teenager said. When I think of the youth imprisoned in Los Padrोसnos, it challenges the binary thinking of innocence and crime. Prison is not a place to protect “survivors” from “perpetrators of violence”. Prison is a place filled with survivors, whose trauma is exacerbated by physical condition and whose needs are constantly ignored. When I think of the youth in Los Padrोसnos, I am reminded that imprisonment itself is a chronic experience of violence.

AN-S: You work at UCLA and are affiliated with the UCLA Cops Off Campus. What is the relationship between the university and the police?

CS: UCLA Finance has long been associated with prisons and police. From 2015 to 2020, UCLA paid Westlaw $ 339,239 and LexisNexis $ 248,490. These companies provide ICE with the data needed to conduct raids and deportations. Then there is the geography of the university, which extends from the main UCLA campus, to the Westwood community, which is also monitored and harassed by the UCPD. And the university also has satellite facilities, such as the Jackie Robinson Stadium, which was used as a “field prison” during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It has facilities like Harbor UCLA Hospital in Torrance where a patient was shot dead. A sheriff’s assistant. If we were to think more in terms of knowledge production, I think many departments of the university could be permanently tied to the cursor argument. One example is the fact that Jeffrey Brantingham is employed by the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. He is the co-founder of the for-profit company PredPol.

AN-S: How has language modified and sanitized conversations around important issues such as immigration?

CS: Before being colonized, Southern California was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. About 90 indigenous languages ​​were spoken in the area. This has changed over the years, but there is one thing that remains: the inhabiting state continues to weaken the indigenous language, culture and people. For example, Dr. Shannon Speed ​​has a book, Prison Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settlement-Capitalist State, in which she writes about how Indigenous women who have migrated from Central America are called Guatemala and spoken in Spanish. He has been kept in custody. This is especially problematic for immigrants in Latin America, who speak Mayan and K’iche and may not be able to access translators in prison and in need.

AN-S: How does LA’s carceral topography inform your emotional awareness of the city?

CS: Carceral history for me feels very embedded in the landscapes and buildings of Los Angeles. In “The City of Prisoners: Conquest in Los Angeles, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging, 1771-1965”, Dr. Kelly Little Hernandez called Los Angeles the capital of the world. People have been pushing against police violence in Los Angeles for generations, and reform has not worked. In 1992, after Rodney King was beaten by police, the town was forced to revolt again. In 2020, again, after the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the people of Los Angeles collectively protested against police violence.

Not much has changed since then. In 2021, the police forcibly removed our now uninhabited neighbors from Lake Echo Park, promoting the beautification and beautification of Los Angeles. The city hosted the Super Bowl in 2022, which brought ICE agents to harass undocumented street vendors – our Brothers Always make sure we have a nice bacon-wrapped hot dog at the end of a fun night. I drive to work on the 101 freeway and stay in traffic. The shadow of the Metropolitan Detention Center stands over me, almost reaching.

AN-S: Elsewhere in the book, you write about hanging out with friends on the beach: “The police said / Are you drunk / Are you high / And we answered / No / We are Salvadoran.” What do these lines mean to you, especially as they relate to public places in Los Angeles?

CS: I think these lines demonstrate how places of joy and recovery become the domain of the police. One goes to the beach and is afraid to drink beer without being charged by the police. He plays loud music at a family gathering and thinks that the police are called to stop the party. As a population, we embody the madness and ubiquity of the police, and then we start policing ourselves, and then we start policing others until we have no place to dance and laugh, without supervision. There was an artist, Tourmaline, who wrote, “Dismiss the police when we say. We mean the police in your head and in your heart.”

AN-S: What does your ideal LA look like?

CS: In my ideal Los Angeles, we will return the land to the people of Tonga and pay compensation. From the Spanish to the Mexican colonies of this land, the police have been used as an abolitionist strategy to protect the inhabited state. It is time to dismiss the police.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, “The Promised Land: Poems from Eternal Life” (Penguin UK, 2017) and “High Desert” (Blood’s Books, 2022), LA and an Ode from the US Southwest.

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