The Mexican man died shortly after he was arrested near an urban border crossing, officials said.
A U.S. border barrier and secondary fence view from Tijuana, Mexico on Jan. 31, 2019.Emilio Espejel / AP file
By Associated Press
EL PASO, Texas — Immigration officials say a Mexican migrant died Monday after his arrest near an urban border crossing.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced the death Tuesday, saying agents arrested the 40-year-old man early Sunday for re-entering the country illegally. His identity wasn't released.
He died at an El Paso hospital after receiving treatment for flu-like symptoms and liver and kidney failure. He's the fourth migrant to die in CBP custody since December, including an 8-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl.
In a statement, ACLU Border Rights Center Director Astrid Dominguez said "a transparent and independent investigation into the conditions at CBP detention facilities and its medical care practices is needed immediately."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside City Lights Bookstore in 2015. Photograph: Stacey Lewis
The last couple of years have taken their toll on Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The American publisher, poet, painter and political activist is frail and nearly blind. He spends a lot of time in bed, relying on his assistant for emails and phone calls.
His body might be failing him. But his mind is still on fire. He’s hoping for a revolution. Trouble is, he says, “the United States isn’t ready for a revolution”.
Ferlinghetti is turning 100 years old this Sunday. And the man knows a thing or two about revolutions. He helped start one himself, changing the face of literary culture in the United States when he co-founded City Lights bookshop in 1953 with a college professor friend, Peter Dean Martin.
Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, Ferlinghetti came to California in the early 1950s, drawn to the state as a place where people could start over. It was what he called this country’s last frontier.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti sought to democratize literature. Photograph: Nat Farbman/The Life Picture Collection/Gett
Ferlinghetti’s mission for his new bookstore and publishing company was aligned with his left-leaning politics: to break literature out of its stuffy, academic cage, its self-centered focus on what he calls “the me me me”, and make it accessible to all.
It was a big risk.
“We were young and foolish,” he says. “And we had no money.”
Unlike most other bookstores around the country, which closed at 5pm on weekdays and were shuttered completely at the weekends, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night. Ferlinghetti wanted to create a sense of community, a place for people to toss around ideas.
The business was originally focused on selling paperback books, at a time when the literary establishment only cared about hardbacks. (These days, it sells both.)
“Paperbacks weren’t considered real books,” says Ferlinghetti. “The only paperback books were murder mysteries and some science fiction.”
But Ferlinghetti was all about democratizing literature. City Lights weathered its fair share of ups and downs over the years, including financial woes and Ferlinghetti’s arrest in 1957 on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking epic poem Howl. The charges were dropped, setting an important precedent for reducing censorship in the publishing world.
The bookstore and publishing house became an institution, attracting and influencing literary figures across the generations, from the author Jack Kerouac to the film-maker Francis Ford Coppola (who once said of Ferlinghetti: “Lawrence gets you laughing, then hits you with the truth”) to the writer and publisher Dave Eggers.
“When I got to San Francisco in 1992, everything we did was sort of influenced by City Lights,” says Eggers. “We were trying to stand on their shoulders.”
Ferlinghetti, left, with the poet Allen Ginsburg, during a 1971 protest over arrests in Brazil. Photograph: Sal Veder/AP
Ferlinghetti himself is an institution. There’s a San Francisco street named after him. The city of San Francisco is proclaiming 24 March, his birthday, “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day”. And his centennial celebrations are going on all month.
Poets such as Devorah Major and Jack Hirschman are gathering to read Ferlinghetti’s poetry, and galleries are exhibiting his paintings. There are documentary screenings, parties and photo exhibitions. And the mayor of San Francisco is presiding over the planting of olive tree in his honor.
“Well, as long as it keeps growing, someone is going to have to water it,” Ferlinghetti says.
He will also release his latest book, Little Boy. This autobiographical novel packed with classical literary allusions is written in a careening, stream-of-consciousness style that feels both intimate and – because it’s written in the third person and mostly does away with conventional paragraphing and punctuation – estranging.
Ferlinghetti, seen in 1982 in San Francisco, rejects the term ‘memoir’ for his new book. Photograph: Chris Felver/Getty Images
The book was many years in the making. It took Ferlinghetti’s longtime, New York-based agent, Sterling Lord, a while to sell. Lord says six publishers contacted him when they heard Ferlinghetti was coming out with a new novel. But all of them ended up turning Little Boy down. “In my view, they were really just the wrong publishers,” Lord says. Ultimately, Penguin Random House’s Doubleday division picked it up.
Little Boy’s story begins, abruptly, with Ferlinghetti’s mother abandoning her newborn son after his father dies of a heart attack. A beloved, childless aunt whisks baby Lawrence off to France. The story rushes forwards, with dizzying circumlocutions, from there. The patchwork of biographical narrative and free-wheeling forays into societal commentary (“the icebergs melting and all that and humankind the temporary tenant floating toward the precipice unable to stop itself and its self-destruction”) makes the book feel like a memoir.
That’s not a word Ferlinghetti uses to describe his new book. “I object to using that description,” he says. “Because a memoir denotes a very genteel type of writing.”
Little Boy is in many respects a challenging read about a hardscrabble experience. But it’s not without its genteel moments – as when Ferlinghetti describes his early years living with his aunt, who at one point was hired as the governess of a wealthy east coast family. The Bisland residence was an enormous mansion in Bronxville, New York, just north of Manhattan. Ferlinghetti describes how the classically educated family patriarch, Presley Bisland, would fire questions at him – “Young man, you’ve been to school – who was Telemachus?” – and ask him to recite poetry for him at the dinner table in exchange for cash.
It wasn’t until Ferlinghetti was studying for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI bill, after serving in the US navy during the second world war, that he started writing his own poetry.
Ferlinghetti, seen at his bookshop in 2006, is known for being accessible to fans. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
I ask him if he still speaks French (“Oui! Certainement!”) and about the encounters, mentioned in Little Boy, with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in postwar Paris. He tells me he never actually met the existentialist couple. But he enjoyed spying on them from a cafe across the street. “I wouldn’t dare go up and try and engage Beauvoir and Sartre in conversation,” Ferlinghetti says. “I can imagine Sartre signalling to the waiter, and the waiter giving me the boot out of the front door.”
But Ferlinghetti is not known for his shyness: he has long been seen as accessible to fans. “He’s very gracious,” says Elaine Katzenberger, City Lights’ current director and publisher, who has known Ferlinghetti since the early 1980s. “When he was still here every day, fixing a lightbulb or some other little thing, he never refused somebody who wanted to talk to him. He usually looked for some commonality to have a little conversation with them.”
Still, doing things the Ferlinghetti way hasn’t always been easy. Katzenberger says his idealistic, poetry-for-all vision is hard to maintain in today’s profit-driven publishing marketplace.
“We don’t have bestsellers, and we’re not publishing bestsellers,” Katzenberger says. “Staying true to those ideals and maintaining them, that’s the hardest thing. And on the other hand, it’s the most important thing.”
At the end of our interview, I ask Ferlinghetti if he’s proud of his many accomplishments.
“I don’t know, that word, ‘proud’, is just too egotistic,” he says.
How about satisfied?
“I would never use that word.”
OK. Um ... happy?
“Yeah, happy would be better,” he says. “Except when you get down to try and define the word happy, then you’re really in trouble.”
He’d really much rather get back to our discussion about what it would take to start a revolution.
“It would take a whole new generation not devoted to the glorification of the capitalist system,” Ferlinghetti says, chuckling. “A generation not trapped in the me, me, me.”
Onstage I’m a mess of tremor and sweat I must have some face-blindness? bc I can’t tell the difference btwn the faces of attention and danger
The gift of panic is clarity—repeat the known quantities:
Today is Wednesday.
Wednesday is a turkey burger.
My throat is full of survivors.
Science says trauma cd be passed down, molecular scar tissue, DNA cavorting w/war and escape routes and yr dad’s bad dad
I’ve inherited this idea to disappear Oh but you’re a natural performer
In the mid 1800s, California wd pay $5 for the head of an NDN and 25¢ per scalp—man, woman, or child. The state was reimbursed by the feds
When yr descended from a clever self adept at evading an occupying force, when contact meant another swath of sick cousins, another cosmology snuffed, another stolen sister
and the water and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood
u flush under the hot lights
*
I can’t write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History
btwn two white ladies in buttery shawls as they pass a display case of “traditional” garb from one tribe or another it doesn’t really matter to anyone
and that word Natural in Natural History hangs also History also Peoples hangs as in frames
it’s horrible how their culture was destroyed
as if in some reckless storm
but thank god we were able to save some of these artifacts—history is so important. Will you look at this metalwork? I could cry—
Look, I’m sure you really do just want to wear those dream catcher earrings. They’re beautiful. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, I’m sure you don’t really think abt us at all. I’m sure you don’t understand the concept of off-limits. But what if by not wearing a headdress in yr music video or changing yr damn mascot and perhaps adding .05% of personal annoyance to yr life for the twenty minutes it lasts, the 103 young ppl who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation over the past four months wanted to live 50% more
I don’t want to be seen, generally, I’m a natural introvert, n I def don’t want to be seen by white ladies in buttery shawls, but I will literally die if I don’t scream
*
An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry
In my poem, I cdn’t get out of bed for two days after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston
me n sweatpants n a new york slice
I feel dry as California where I somehow managed to thrive in a climate of drought for thousands of years w/o draining the state, yet somehow we were primitive?
Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.
America says some ppl are raised guilty. Some are innocent of everything. Some ppl will always have to be good sports remain calm
Remain Calm
Remain Calm
Who even wants to go into space? I fucking hate traveling I’m a weirdo NDN faggot and frankly that limits my prospects plus it sucks—watching the couples and the string lights slow-dance in Monbijoupark, to realize despite history my own abrupt American body America that green ghost, been after me for at least a couple hundred years somehow once convinced me to do its dirty work for it sharp in a warm bath
Sun breaks upon the Pacific Northwest. Is this a nature poem again
Thanks to William Allegrezza at Moria Books, and to over 140 contributors, The End of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall and me) is now published. In two volumes. Two big fat volumes. Copies are available at Moria (scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page where you will find the book. Click on the cover and download a free pdf. Or buy a copy. It's up to you.
Here are the pdfs. You can see the list of contributors in the TOC to the first volume. They are the ones who make the book what it is. We are very happy and proud to be part of it. Enjoy. (And may a miracle happen: may humans come to their senses pretty immediately and not turn this place into a catastrophic mess.)
While California's attorney general announced Tuesday that he won't file criminal charges against two Sacramento police officers in the death of unarmed black man Stephon Clark, his mother said she can understand why people's anger and frustrations are spilling into the streets.
"If that helps those that are protesting, then I'm all for it," SeQuette Clark told NBC News in an exclusive interview that aired Wednesday. "It's just a big reminder of where we are and who we are, and that being said, do what you got to do."
The announcement sparked a night of unrest in Sacramento on Monday with about 80 arrests, including of clergy members and a journalist, and then a raucous City Council meeting on Tuesday in which the audience shouted down Mayor Darrell Steinberg and someone jumped on the lectern.
Steinberg had called for an investigation of police tactics that were used during the previous night's protest after complaints from activists who were surrounded on a freeway overpass. The city is bracing for potentially more demonstrations this week.
SeQuette Clark has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and the officers for more than $20 million, alleging her son was the victim of excessive force and racial profiling. While the officers believed Stephon Clark was armed, only a cellphone was found at the scene.
A private autopsy concluded that he was shot eight times, with nearly all of the bullets striking him from behind.
"It's so hard to be reminded that I'm a black citizen in America, and that means absolutely nothing," SeQuette Clark said, adding, "I believed for a moment that we would have justice."
I've been Jewish all my life. I was born five years after Auschwitz. I have Holocaust survivors in my family. Etc. Etc. I know anti-Semitism when I see it. Ilhan Omar is no anti-Semite. She's simply pro-Palestinian. I am pro-Palestinian.
Criticizing Israel's psychopathic, imperial, and genocidal behavior towards Palestinians is not anti-Semitic. Talking about the benjamins is not anti-Semitic, unless $100 bills are Jewish. They are not. Saying that some American Jews appear to have "dual loyalty" is not-Antisemitic when it's true. And it's true.
Fuck AIPAC and all those others who want to conflate criticism of Israel, whether it's by trying to destroy Omar, or those who support BDS (I support BDS), or or or or or.
Fuck em. I stand with Ilhan Omar.
PS. Israel is a terrible country. But it's no worse than my own, the United States.
