Artwork by Kaya Joan
It’s the beginning of the semester, and fifteen of my students, from all over the country—also one from China and another from Korea—sit in a small bungalow trailer situated in the parking lot of a building supply warehouse store. The bungalow trailer houses the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center which is part of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), and the jornaleros who come here to seek work also share their stories.
One guy spent his childhood ducking under desks in his classroom, hiding from stray bullets from a war raging outside in his hometown in San Salvador. Another guy spent much of his adult life drenched in music. He would perform the danza de viejitos, the dance of the old men, which he later demonstrated for my students on campus, wearing a papier-mâché mask and the infamous clankity-clank huaraches while holding a cane, his guitar nearby. He came here to make a better way for his wife and daughter. But that is another story; this is the story of day laborers.
There are seven NDLON day-labor worker centers in the Los Angeles area. They see, on average, fifty people a day. The jornaleros sign in and wait as they are assigned work on a first-come, first-served basis. In the meantime, the center offers a range of services, including computer literacy classes, English Language Learner classes, health and safety trainings, and specialized clinics like tenants’ rights clinics, Know Your Rights clinics, and immigration documentation preparation. For many day laborers and gig workers today, the workplace is not a stationary address where one clocks in and out, but is transient—they spend four hours digging a ditch in the Valley one day, do home renovations before a party in Hollywood on the weekend, and spend six hours cleaning up a construction site another day. This piecemeal approach leaves workers vulnerable.
The first formal efforts of organizing day labor centers in the city began in the nineties; in response to heavy policing, they came together and developed and distributed libretas or wage claim booklets that advised workers of their rights against wage theft. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network was founded in Northridge, California, in July 2001.
At the center with my students, a woman shares a story of how she and her two daughters have been harassed by their landlord for years: him throwing rocks and bricks on their roof, making noise, trying to scare them off. How he did not allow her to have visitors, how they were sometimes without electricity.
When one of the jornaleros defined wage theft, one of the students’ faces lit up with recognition. My student said her bosses always made her clock in and out at certain times but would continue to demand that she finish cleaning up the tables, filling the salt and sugar shakers, or making her claim a lunch break even if she worked her way through it by taking orders and serving customers.
Wage theft isn’t just the economic terror and humiliation of working for some rich guy for weeks on end only not to get paid, only to be threatened with, “Well, what are you going to do? You’re an illegal.” Though it is also that.
My students attend ICE watch trainings, help organize Know Your Rights clinics, and teach English to the day laborers as part of witnessing others when writing about their struggles. My class is also part of a required program at the college, wherein students do at least forty hours of volunteer work with a community partner. One student had been struggling throughout the semester. She was late on some assignments, and came to me after class one day to ask if she could talk to me. “I’m not okay,” was all she said, crying and shaking. Her parents were undocumented, and here she was in this fancy school instead of at home where she translated for them. They’d cleaned houses and done construction work so she could build a better life for herself. But she wasn’t doing well in her classes. When she taught English to the jornaleros, she recognized herself in one of her students who was shy to say the answers he already knew. Like him, the pressure to outperform her peers made her freeze. She asked herself, How could she be failing when she had it so good?
“Scholactivism alienates the public and degrades research.” These words were the subheading of a piece written by University of Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg in The Chronicle of Higher Education (though the piece first appeared in inquisitive). The sentiment made me immediately wary, as I always am when someone tries to tell me not to do something. A resistance to activism in the academy, especially now, is a resistance to social justice. His premise is that allowing activism into scholarship has caused some disciplines to “become highly ideological, creating echo chambers that stall progress.” In short, Ginsburg states this influx has caused disciplines to become undisciplined.
When I initially read about this idea, I admit I was tickled. I teach an autotheory course called Becoming Undisciplined. For me that is the aim: a destabilization, a move away from mastery. When I think of mastery, I think of those drawing contests in the backs of magazines featuring a turtle called “Tippy” wearing a newsboy cap and a turtleneck shirt. The closest replica wins a prize! Up to $5000 in prizes.
Philosopher Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation explains this disciplining, which attempts to place and maintain us in certain categories based on hierarchy and identity. The example he gives is when a cop hollers at you on the street, Hey, hey you. And you know it’s you the cop is calling. You stop in your tracks. You’ve been hailed. It’s a way to stall people, keep them fixed.
The mastery that is so often thrust upon us, is often, as Ginsburg attempts to do too, simply a way of the act of hailing us wild and undisciplined ones into place. But I’ve found it’s in the fissures, and the resistance, the all around mess where the real learning takes place.
Ginsburg’s critique reminds me of when my advisor pulled me aside and demanded, “Why are you here?”
It’s in the fissures, and the resistance, the all around mess where the real learning takes place.
I was there because it was what I’d always wanted. My story begins in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is one of those places where rich kids and poor kids can hook up and congregate; in my day they met in Westwood Village. Specifically, the steps that led up to the Carl’s Jr., or a place we just called “the payphones” that had a gaggle of pay phones outside a liquor store where we’d beg spare change off of college students until we had enough to get forties of Mickeys or Old E 8 ball. One of us girls would jut our tits out and ask a guy going into the liquor store if he’d buy our drinks in exchange for a few bucks. All westside bus lines led there. I took the number 12 blue bus. I was a poor kid—I lived in Palms with my single mother. The rich kids took the #2 Sunset RTD; it ran from the Pacific Palisades to Brentwood to Bel Air to Westwood. They had. They had spare bedrooms, stacks of CDs, velvet dresses from Betsey Johnson, Doc Martens, pagers, car phones, cable, housekeepers, absent parents. They’d go on to study somewhere in the East: Columbia, NYU.
One birthday my mother surprised me. We left dinner at a restaurant and when we got back to our apartment some of my new wealthy friends were there as part of a reveal of a makeover she’d given my room. She’d gotten me new sheets and a bedspread, something very feminine and floral, and something else, lacy curtains, or I think she’d rearranged the furniture. My friends were propped on the bed, hollering “Surprise!” and all I could think was Roaches roaches roaches. Did they see any roaches? I still burn with shame when I think of the memory. Both the shame of my friends seeing the roaches in our house, and the shame of the way we lived. Shame fueled much of the Want.
My people suffered from poverty and a variety of chronic illnesses: diabetes, metabolic disease, high blood pressure, eczema, glaucoma, arthritis, alcoholism, and mental illness. You could blame their symptoms on wars—wars fought here and wars in the Philippines. You could blame it on Capitalism. The FBI. You could blame it on canned meat. SPAM. When my dissertation advisor called me for a reckoning and demanded, “Why are you here? Is it for the degree?” I couldn’t find a way to respond. It’s the SPAM. It’s the degree, and it’s not just that.
My advisor continued, “There’s only one reason to be here. It’s because you want this life.”
The life she was referring to was indeed something I wanted if it meant upper-middle-class status, recognition from prestigious grants, and tenure. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing that gave her the impression I did not want that life, except for perhaps publishing a novel (finally), and working on and appearing in a Netflix docuseries. To a serious scholar these might have proven to be distractions, but for me, they were a way to build a life in words.
All I knew was that I was participating in the thing I’d wanted my entire life—and yet I was somehow failing at it, or at least failing to express how badly I wanted it, when it was the Want itself that had me caught like a rabbit in headlights.
It was the Want itself that had me caught like a rabbit in headlights.
It’s not just that the summer before kindergarten began, I spent my days on my mother’s college campus, sitting in the cafeteria coloring, roaming the library, sometimes even sitting in classes with her.
It’s not just that I’d sit quietly, pretending I was a student; I’d look up and act as if I understood the professor and when students bent their heads and jotted notes, I’d color in my coloring book because I got the sense that whatever was happening there was very important and that it was our ticket out of poverty.
It’s not just that when it was only her and me, we shopped at the Pic N’ Save for bathroom furniture, cardboard drawer sets, jelly shoes, a latchkey life of Hungry-Man frozen dinners, and twenty-year-old appliances that required constant tending. For these reasons, college was always my plan.
It’s not just that in junior high, I was enrolled in an accelerated program that would enable me to graduate high school with an Associate of Arts degree and smoothly transition into college, but then a turn came—I entered foster care.
It’s not just that at my first group home I was warned it would be very difficult for me to continue on in school and that I should consider taking the GED or the California High School Proficiency Exam.
It’s not just that at the time, I’d had my heart set on Sarah Lawrence College, a college in upstate New York; I’d read that Alice Walker had gone there and that her talents were discovered by her English professor, and I thought that could happen for me too.
It’s not just that I didn’t realize then that I’d spend years shuffling between various group homes and foster families, going to Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park, California every six months, to determine where I’d land next.
It’s not just that Edelman’s is what I call the saddest place on earth; children pirated in on a van, and then sent to wait in a room with low tables and squat chairs, so that if you were a teenager like I was, your knees landed around your armpits. We’d watch children’s movies and cartoons waiting for our names to be called, and eventually we’d be taken into a courtroom where our parents sat on one side, and we sat on the other, as our attorneys argued for our reunification or further separation.
It’s not just that it had all the trimmings of divorce court: one party out of their mind with desperation, the other’s frontal lobe still developing.
It’s not just that once I was successfully emancipated, I was told by my social worker that my best bet was to sign up for General Relief, which at the time meant $212 a month and food stamps. Not to state the obvious, but Sarah Lawrence was no longer a possibility.
It’s not just that I was dressed up and taken out to impress a friend’s parents over tea to convince them to help pay for my education.
It’s not just that I landed at a Cal State and had a small apartment off campus—which was not unlike the shitty carpeted apartments with cottage cheese ceilings I had shared with my mother.
It’s not just that I’d buy a loaf of white bread, instant coffee, and a can of sweetened condensed milk at the 7-Eleven on the corner and live off of that.
It’s not just that I spent that first year of college in a series of ridiculous jobs: phone banking, calling people to refinance their mortgages, selling Herbalife, and working as a data entry clerk. It’s not just that my grades suffered and I eventually dropped out of school.
It’s the fact that—in the winter of 2018, I sat in a parking garage, overcome with a foreign feeling. I’d just taken the single subject GRE in Literature exam, and I’d booked an hour-long float in a sensory deprivation tank across town. I thought that perhaps my claustrophobia and the absolute nothingness of the space would take my head out of worrying about the results. But this sudden onslaught of feeling made me pause. I needed to find the word. What was the container for this sensation? Want.
Oh, how long had it been since I’d allowed myself to want something so desperately far out of reach?
In her most recent essay collection, Authority, critic Andrea Long Chu writes, “You have had another realization: not getting what you want has very little to do with wanting it. Knowing better usually doesn’t make it better. You don’t want something because wanting it will lead to getting it. You want it because you want it. This is the zero-order disappointment that structures all desire and makes it possible. After all, if you could only want things you were guaranteed to get, you would never be able to want anything at all.”
I’ve often described my experience of adolescence as a meatsack of want; I think what I wanted most was the love and acceptance of my foster parents. I had no idea I was going to be thrown into a revolving door of placements: a group home in Santa Monica, a family in Cheviot Hills, another family in Cheviot Hills, a group home in the Pacific Palisades, running away and couch surfing, the first family now again remarried and rearranged in La Cañada, and eventual emancipation.
When I did get accepted to the PhD program of my dreams, I was asked to confront the twin affects of disappointment and desire of wanting that Chu wrote about on a regular basis. But this wanting was also a very familiar sensation to my younger self, the foster kid, desperate as I was to appease the most stringent person in the room. My windmill.
“Tilting at windmills.” I first came across this expression in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “I have stopped tilting at windmills and, instead, have tried to accomplish the little daily tasks, unimportant in themselves, but tasks that are an integral part of living fully.” On first read, the phrasing struck me as quite lyrical for that text. Turns out it originated from Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. It’s from a scene where Don Quixote imagines himself fighting giants when in fact, they were just a gaggle of windmills. Both Quixote and the recovering alcoholic outwardly fight internal terrors.
I’d spent my whole life tilting at windmills. In my case, the enemies were part imagined and part real, as I’d been hollowed out, and interpellated, by my want.
I’d spent my whole life tilting at windmills. In my case, the enemies were part imagined and part real, as I’d been hollowed out, and interpellated, by my want.
This business of tilting at windmills has come naturally to me, and at times, has kept me safe. As a ward of the court, I become a character in someone else’s story. There was a long while where I lost my own story, because it was a burden, or rather it was a story of how I was a burden. My body became a house for bureaucracy, rules, laws, taxation, restrictions. Watch the poor woman fail in school. I thought perhaps there was a safer version of myself on the other side of those windmills.
I have little use for the tilting today. It’s a hard habit to break, but there’s too much on the line. The windmills are raging a war of control over our minds. People like Ginsburg and worse, this administration, dictate what we can and cannot teach, or what makes for legitimate scholarship. Our minds—to be won in conquest. The tilting ends here for something else; for a life with more possibilities to begin.
In her earlier publication, Females, Andrea Long Chu writes, “Everyone is female and everyone hates it.” Females is informed and inspired by SCUM Manifesto, a self-published text by the radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who is perhaps most known for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol. Yet Females goes beyond the claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition. Chu defines female as “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” An extension of what feminist scholar Lauren Berlant has dubbed “the female complaint.” Berlant notes, “Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.”
Love and recognition were tricky riddles for a queer biracial adolescent in foster care. I spent much of my time shucking and jiving, studying closely how my foster mother moved, spoke, dressed. Emulating her, hoping she would want to keep me.
To return to my advisor’s question, Why are you here? It’s the fact that my adolescent heart was scorched by the parallel mantras dontgettooattacheddontgettoattacheddontgettooattached and lovemelovemeloveme. This same anxiety arose in graduate school where I figured at any given moment, I could receive a phone call claiming they’d made a mistake, I had not actually been accepted into the program. I grappled with my critical dissertation project and what it was I would declare to be my intervention.
Prior to graduate school, much of my professional work was as a labor union organizer. I also worked as a journalist. As part of my scholarship, I engaged with archives of the dispossessed, children who’d died within the foster care system. As is the nature of archival work, I tried to uncover the narrative hidden behind the black boxes, the redacted names of children and parents living in poverty. I searched for connections, themes, outliers. I discovered some troubling repetitions, trends hidden amongst the narratives of the dominant.
I’d thought perhaps changing this fact, upending these inequities, would be my intervention. I took the word literally. It wasn’t until later that I realized that intervention for many of my peers, particularly my advisor, meant discourse. When people were inquiring about my intervention they wanted to know how I would contribute to an ongoing conversation. Which in turn made me grateful for all the people who came before me, people who offered language to legitimize my work in the academy. People such as political theorist Achille Mbembe who came up with the notion of “necropolitics”—the use of social and political power to dictate who should live and who should die—along with feminist scholar Lauren Berlant who wrote of “slow forms of killing.” Thanks to them, I learned that there was in fact a place in the academy to bridge theory and practice, that upheld tenets like “The personal is political.”
The work I’ve done outside of the academy has been integral to the work I’ve done within it. The thousands of hours of door-knocking and phone-banking and collective bargaining and bread-breaking and protesting. This is not just about shutting down traffic by standing in the center of the street, fists in air. Though it is also about that.
I finished my five-year doctoral program in four years, I organized a union of graduate student workers while I was there (increasing our annual stipend from $30,000 to $50,000), and I was not only the first person to graduate from the creative nonfiction track, but the first former LA County foster youth to graduate from the program altogether.
Activism belongs in the academy just as firmly as all other forms of intellectual rigor. Activism teaches our students in an integral time of their lives how to be with other people. We should ask ourselves: why would anyone want to dictate the boundaries of scholarship? As Ginsburg writes in his opinion piece on scholactivism, “If disciplines are a necessary locus of governance, one must then ask the standard questions of all governance institutions: Who guards the guardians?” In writing the opinion piece, it appears Tom Ginsburg has promoted himself to that position.
On April 22, 2025, ICE raided the Home Depot in Pomona, detaining over a dozen jornaleros, three of them the people my students met in the bungalow outside the building supply warehouse, at English Language Learner classes, and Know Your Rights clinics. For three days we couldn’t identify everyone who was detained or where they were being held. My students and I panicked and cried at the news.
There’s nothing beautiful that can be said about that.