Death of trans immigrant in detention forges united protests

Recently a solidarity vigil was carried out in Los Angeles for Victoria Arrelano, a Mexican transperson with AIDS who died in an ICE immigration detention facility in L.A. The vigil reflected the coming together of very diverse groups: people fighting for immigrant rights, Latino community groups, AIDS activists and the LGBT community. The full story is here.

It was, of course, a sad story. But I found one part deeply moving and also profoundly consciousness-raising and inspiring. Victoria’s birth name was Victor, and when ICE detained and imprisoned her they placed her in a male cell block designed to hold 50 prisoners, but which was crammed with 80 people. The prisoners were other ICE detainees awaiting deportation or other legal proceedings. Like many of us I am sure that most of them had limited experience and knowledge of transpersons or people with AIDS. Moreover, they were being forced into already miserable and unhealthy living conditions. It would be easy to imagine that even if Victoria had not been subjected to outright brutality by her fellow prisoners, at a minimum she would have been shunned.

That’s not what happened.

Leslie Feinberg, in her article about Victoria, recounts how the male prisoners not only advocated for her, demanding that she receive medical treatment as she became more and more ill, but they also cared for her throughout her illness. Imagine the scene: overcrowded, uncomfortable, unhealthy conditions. A transperson with AIDS becoming sick . . . suffering from severe cramps, vomiting, diarrhea . . . eventually so weak that she cannot even move from her bed. And her fellow prisoners caring for her, bringing her food and water, helping her to care for herself, and finally taking turns carrying her to the bathroom because she could not walk by herself.

“The men described how they used their bath towels soaked in cold water to try to bring down her fever and brought cardboard boxes for her to throw up into. The immigrant detainees cleaned up the blood and vomit.”

So why did Victoria have to die? Not because of a lack of caring by her fellow prisoners – people poor and desperate like her – but because of outright medical neglect and a callous indifference to human life by the prison authorities. Victoria died because she was not permitted to use the medications that she was taking to stave off AIDS-related infections and when she became ill she was not treated.

One of the filthiest of lies to which we are subjected in this society is that the well-heeled, the professional, the middle-class and the educated are the repository of all tender feelings, humanitarianism, and concerns for fairness and justice. They are also often portrayed to us as broad-minded and sympathetic for people not like themselves. Working people and poor people, by contrast, are often portrayed as ignorant, selfish and narrow-minded. Men of color in particular are often presented in the media – especially in the context of xenophobic attacks on immigrants – as “macho” and abusive toward women and gay people.

But who would have saved Victoria’s life if they could? And who killed her because they did not care to save her life?

And on a deeper level, isn’t Victoria’s death really a part and parcel of the violence that is directed every single day against people of color, againat LGBT people, against immigrants, and against prisoners? While we often tend to see U.S. society as fundamentally well-ordered, basically peaceful, and providing “opportunities” for all, it is in reality an unspeakably violent place that exists in that fashion so that a small portion of the population can be provided with a life insulated from not only violence but virtually all hardship.

Mao Zedong once described his personal process of “unlearning” the lies of privilege and wealth and learning how to be in solidarity with other human beings in this way:

“Here I might mention the experience of how my own feelings changed. I began life as a student and at school acquired the ways of a student; I then used to feel it undignified to do even a little manual labour, such as carrying my own luggage in the presence of my fellow students, who were incapable of carrying anything, either on their shoulders or in their hands. At that time I felt that intellectuals were the only clean people in the world, while in comparison workers and peasants were dirty. I did not mind wearing the clothes of other intellectuals, believing them clean, but I would not put on clothes belonging to a worker or peasant, believing them dirty. But after I became a revolutionary and lived with workers and peasants and with soldiers of the revolutionary army, I gradually came to know them well, and they gradually came to know me well too. It was then, and only then, that I fundamentally changed the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feelings implanted in me in the bourgeois schools. I came to feel that compared with the workers and peasants the unremoulded intellectuals were not clean and that, in the last analysis, the workers and peasants were the cleanest people and, even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals.”

(Talks at the Yenan Forum, 1942)

This is how we, progressive people who want to transform society, have to first of all transform ourselves. If those of us who live with privilege, whether it is skin color or class or sex or gender expression, are unable to burn out of our consciousness all of the lies we have been taught about whose hands are clean and whose hands are dirty, then we will never be able to grasp on a day to day basis the reality of the society in which we live.  And without understanding it, we will not be able to change it.