What would Los Angeles look like without Carceral Architecture?

Christopher Soto is the living embodiment of the best poetry being written in Los Angeles right now: queer, punk, pro-diaspora, irresistibly spirited, and political, with an unparalleled ability to turn the most pressing of literary matters into a backyard party. Soto’s instantly infectious work pulsates with the rhythm of the spoken-word and grindcore visuals that defined her earlier years outside of Los Angeles. I was initially drawn to Soto’s work through his activism. Along with authors Javier Zamora and Marcelo Hernández Castillo, Soto co-founded the Underkupoets campaign, which lobbied American publishers to remove proof of citizenship requirements from first-book competitions and introduce a new generation of undocumented authors into publishing. helped.

Soto’s long-awaited first collection, “Diaries of a Terrorist” (Copper Canyon Press), takes policing and the elimination of the human cage as its central mission. Soto’s poems of dissent are refreshingly clear, and the book’s stylistically avant-garde yet highly relatable poems include many important conversations within the abolitionist movement, such as youth detention, migrants at the border, airport security. Imprisonment of troubled people and Palestinian activists. While it explicitly calls for the end of the police state, “Diary of a Terrorist” is also filled with a personal history that finds its voice in confessional poems where Soto moves on from the pain of the experience to remind us. Grows that a more just world is not only possible, but necessary – to be a loving tribute to a life plagued by domestic violence, imprisonment for profit, and the grimness of everything it takes to achieve it in Los Angeles. Realities.

Soto and I talked about how California’s carnal history has shaped and eroded LA’s urban fabric, and what their ideal city might look like without the police’s architecture.

Andre Nafis-Friend: “Diary of a Terrorist” took 10 years to build, and before that, you published a chapbook and a poetry zine. I’m curious to know who were your first artistic idols and how they influenced you.

Christopher Soto: In high school, I remember seeing colloquial poets like Shihan and Gina Loring. It was a time when “Def Poetry Jam” was on TV. I would go to A Mic and Dim Lights in Pomona and The Poetry Lounge at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. I was on a slam poetry team with other young Black, Latinx, Tongan poets who taught me words like oa attu (I love you in Tongan). We met under the railroad tracks in Ontario at his coach’s house, and he would teach us how to organize our bodies and voices in relation to the content of the poems. I will also host huge recitals of spoken poems with drumlines, breakdancers and graffiti artists. I used to paint and do street art on my own. During these years, I used to go to music venues like Smell in Downtown LA, they had free haircuts and breakfast during Sunday morning shows, where you could see bands like Mika Miko for $5. I was a vocalist in a grindcore band called Ambulance Ride, and we produced an EP.

AN-S: How do you think you have changed as an artist since your early beginnings?

CS: My younger self was writing as a person and concerned with interpersonal relationships. I often delve into how my poems can affect the physical reality of the world and how poetry can create a more just place, if only momentarily. There is an abolitionist geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote, “If justice is embodied, it is always endemic, that is to say, part of the process of creating a place.” I think my older people see writing as a communal process and are more concerned with structural violence.

AN-S: You grew up in California during one of the most dramatic expansions of the carol system. How did it affect you?

CS: Whenever I visit my Abuela’s grave in San Fernando Mission, I think about how the first examples of human cages occurred in the 1780s in an area where Spanish clergy locked unmarried Tongva women and girls in dormitories at night. Had done it. I drive through city streets and wonder which ones were built by the Chain Gang in the 1880s. I go to see art with friends in Little Tokyo and think about how the neighborhood must have felt when Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps in the 1940s. I see military equipment deployed against unarmed civilians in protests, and I remember the first SWAT unit formed in Los Angeles in response to the Watts rebellion in 1965.

AN-S: One of my favorite poems is “The Children in Their Little Bullet-Proof Vest” in “Diary of a Terrorist,” where you discuss writing workshops for imprisoned youth in California. What struck you most about that experience?

CS: Around 2011, I was living in Long Beach and teaching poetry to imprisoned youth at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Detention Center in Downey. A teenage girl imprisoned there told me that her mother would bring abusive men home. She said that the courts did not believe her story. This teenage girl told me she would try to send her back as soon as she was released from Los Padrinos. As we sat at a stainless steel table, preparing to write poems together, this teenage girl said it was safer to be in prison than to return home to her mother. When I think of the youth who were imprisoned in Los Padrinos, it challenges the binary thinking of innocence versus criminality. A prison is not a place that protects the “living people” from “perpetrators of violence”. A prison is a place filled with survivors whose trauma is exacerbated by a cancerous condition and whose needs are continually ignored. When thinking of the youth in Los Padrinos, I am reminded that being in captivity is itself an experience of chronic violence.

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

CS: UCLA finance has long been associated with prisons and policing. From 2015 to 2020, UCLA paid Westlaw $339,239 and LexisNexis $248,490. These companies provide the data needed to conduct raids and deportations to ICE. Then there is the geography of the university that extends from the main UCLA campus itself into the community of Westwood, which is also surveyed and persecuted by 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 and killed. A sheriff’s deputy. If we are thinking more in terms of knowledge production, I think many university departments can be tied up to uphold carnal logic. One example is the fact that Jeffrey Brantham is employed by the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. He is the co-founder of the for-profit company PredPol, an acronym for predictive policing, that uses historical crime data (known to be deeply racially biased) to try to predict future crime. uses it.

AN-S: How has the language made conversations around important issues like immigration narrow and clean?

CS: Before colonization, Southern California was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. About 90 indigenous languages ​​were spoken in this region. This has changed over the years but there is one constant: the settler state is creating vulnerable indigenous languages, cultures and peoples. For example, Dr. Shannon Speed ​​has a book called “Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State,” where she writes about how indigenous women who migrated from Central America were called Guatemala. Can be visited and spoken in Spanish. being taken into custody. This forced assimilation is particularly troublesome for migrants in Latindad who, let’s say, speak Maya and K’iche’ and may not be able to access translators if needed.

AN-S: How has LA’s carol topography informed your emotional awareness of the city?

CS: Carceral history is very much embedded in the landscape and buildings of Los Angeles for me. In “City of Prisoners: Conquest, Rebellion and the Rise of the Human Cage in Los Angeles, 1771–1965”, Dr. Kelly Little Hernandez calls Los Angeles the caroral capital of the world. People have been pushing against police violence in Los Angeles for generations, and reform isn’t working. In 1992, after Rodney King was beaten up by the police, the city was again forced to revolt. In 2020, again, following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Los Angeles people protested mass police violence.

Not much has changed since then. Police promoted the beautification and gentrification of Los Angeles with the forcible removal of our currently non-domesticated neighbors at Echo Park Lake in 2021. The City Hosted the Super Bowl in 2022, Bringing on ICE Agents to Harass Undocumented Street Vendors hermanos It always makes sure we have a nice bacon-wrapped hot dog at the end of a fun night out. I drive to work on the 101 freeway and sit in traffic. The shadow cast by the Metropolitan Detention Center stands above 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’re Salvadoran.” What do these lines mean to you, especially as they relate to public space in Los Angeles?

CS: I think these lines show how places of joy and relief also become the domain of policing. One goes to the beach and is afraid to drink beer without being charged by the police. Music plays too loudly at a family gathering and thinks that the police may be called to call off the party. As a population, we embody the paranoia and omnipresence of the police, and then we start policing ourselves, and then we start policing others until it’s time for us to dance and laugh. There is no place left, without monitoring. There is an artist, Tourmaline, who wrote, “When we say kill the police. We mean the cop in your head and in your heart too.”

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

CS: In my ideal Los Angeles, we would return the land to the Tongawa people and pay reimbursement. From the Spanish to Mexican to American colonization of this land, policing has been used as an eradication strategy to protect the settler state. It’s time to eliminate the police.

Andre Nafees-Saheli is the author of two collections of poetry, “The Promised Land: Poems from Eternal Life” (Penguin UK, 2017) and “High Desert” (Blooddaux Books, 2022), an ode to the LA and US Southwest.

Images from more stories