asks its audience to do something a lot of us are bad at: Listen. The Pacific Northwest premiere of Carissa Atallah's play at Milagro Theatre gives a platform to angry and anguished young Latinos who live in fear of the U.S. government's war on immigrants.
Tropic Death is a truly trailblazing counter-pastoral portrait of the Caribbean locales of his youth, inverting the racist fantasy of the 'tropics' as a fertile paradise populated by lazy primitives.
It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe here, she says. Alongside a growing fear, childhood memories resurfaced—the internal and external racism and the exhaustion of never quite fitting in. I moved to Australia when I was seven and didn't speak English—it was a tough time for me, she admits. And then there was one particular recurring thought. There were many times when I'd wake up as a teenager and think to myself: Wouldn't life be easier if I were white?
The sculpture, "Untitled" (2022), by the late artist Radcliffe Bailey, is a striking visual metaphor for W.E.B. Du Bois's doctrine of double consciousness, the social historian's conceptualization of African Americans' racial positioning post-emancipation. In their orientation, the twin busts suggest the crisis of identity experienced under the duress of racism; the subjects' autonomous self-fashioning is at odds with their marginalized civic position.
Others said they were offended. But the restaurant, whose name is a mashup of white and Mexicans, is real, and opened earlier this month on Northern Boulevard in the heart of Jackson Heights. Cristina Furlong, a longtime neighborhood resident and member of Community Board 3, wished the restaurant well on Facebook but urged the owners to change the name, given heightened immigration enforcement and "people self-deporting."
"I hated being different, speaking differently, and having customs and traditions that differed from those of mainstream America. In Hong Kong, we were part of the Chinese majority. But this all changed when my parents decided to move the family to America when I was a toddler."
