Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm crazy and I'm Holly Fry, and you sound a
Speaker 1: little I do. I'm getting over from credit, so I
Speaker 1: have an interesting voice. I could sing some torch songs
Speaker 1: this week, but I won't. Instead, I'll just record things
Speaker 1: and people can enjoy a completely different timber to my
Speaker 1: voice or not enjoy it. That's far too Yes. Well,
Speaker 1: and on the subject of enjoying or not enjoying, we've
Speaker 1: had several two part episodes lately. We keep accidentally picking
Speaker 1: things that have so much depth that it's hard to
Speaker 1: get him in one. Yeah. Yeah. And some people love
Speaker 1: two part episodes and some people hate them. So if
Speaker 1: you hate two part episodes, I'm sorry. We're likely going
Speaker 1: to be dialing back on them and then coming months. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we'll choose some things that are more conducive to being
Speaker 1: in one thirty minute episode be encapsulated. Right. Today, we
Speaker 1: are going to talk in our first of two parts
Speaker 1: about Audrey Lord, who called herself a quote black feminist,
Speaker 1: lesbian mother poet warrior. It's an awesome string. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of adjectives it is, or a lot of
Speaker 1: descriptive nouns. But for a lot of people she's best
Speaker 1: known for like the poet part, or maybe also the
Speaker 1: feminist part. She showed a great deal of promise as
Speaker 1: a poet really early in her career and attracted the
Speaker 1: attention and support of other really prominent poets, poets like
Speaker 1: Length and Hughes and Gwendolen Brooks and Audrey and Rich
Speaker 1: And she went on to just write prolifically and win
Speaker 1: numerous awards for her writing. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: she was way ahead of her time on all kinds
Speaker 1: of social fronts, including feminism and gay rights and the
Speaker 1: sexual revolution. And she was just unapologetic in her view
Speaker 1: that you just can't address issues like sexism without also
Speaker 1: examining their relationship to racism and homophobia and class struggles
Speaker 1: and all of these other nuances and complexities that affect
Speaker 1: people's identities and how they're treated well. And she also
Speaker 1: struggled with depression for a lot of her life. She
Speaker 1: wrote about it as well. Her books The Cancer Journals
Speaker 1: and A Verst of Light chronicled her experience with breast cancer,
Speaker 1: which was, as you can imagine, not always fun and
Speaker 1: sunny affair. It was not at all that, and that's
Speaker 1: something that will talk more about in the second part
Speaker 1: of this two parter and a lot of college classes
Speaker 1: and introductions to collection of her work and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Addy Lord is presented as sort of this
Speaker 1: larger than life black lesbian feminist icon, somebody who deeply
Speaker 1: believed in the power of language and drew from multiple
Speaker 1: aspects of her own identity, including her ethnicity, her race,
Speaker 1: her sexual orientation, and her gender to fight for equality
Speaker 1: on every possible front. And identity was really at the
Speaker 1: heart of her work, and she felt that each person
Speaker 1: had to really understand their own identity to be able
Speaker 1: to really experience and relate to the world. Um Over
Speaker 1: the next two episodes will be talking about the life
Speaker 1: that led her to these views and influenced her creative work.
Speaker 1: And so in the first part today we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about her childhood, her early life, and her college years,
Speaker 1: and then part two will pick up with her relationship
Speaker 1: with a man named Ed Rollins, who was the father
Speaker 1: of her two children, and that will take us also
Speaker 1: through the end of her life and as often as
Speaker 1: the case even with two episodes, will not be an
Speaker 1: exhaustive Audrey Lord exploration. No, there's I think in um.
Speaker 1: Any time you're doing two or left episodes on a topic,
Speaker 1: you're never going to hit everything. If you do want it,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go ahead and and pitch this now and
Speaker 1: I'll say it at the end of the next episode. Also,
Speaker 1: if you do want a much more exhaustive view of
Speaker 1: the life of Audrey Lord, there's a biography of her
Speaker 1: called Warrior Poet UH that is quite thorough and extremely
Speaker 1: well sourced. So so there you go. If you want
Speaker 1: more pick up. So to talk about her, we really
Speaker 1: need to talk about her perspective and how it started,
Speaker 1: really uh with her parents, who were named Frederick Byron
Speaker 1: and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lord. They were immigrants from Grenada
Speaker 1: in the Southern Caribbean, Uh and her father had actually
Speaker 1: been born in Barbados, though they moved from Grenada to Harlem,
Speaker 1: New York in four during the Harlem Renaissance, and in
Speaker 1: addition to seeing a huge amount of artistic and literary
Speaker 1: and political work from the African American community at the time,
Speaker 1: Harlem had also become home to a really growing community
Speaker 1: of black immigrants from elsewhere in the world, including a
Speaker 1: sizeable influx of people from the Caribbean, and the Lord's
Speaker 1: immigrated on the advice of one of Linda's sisters who
Speaker 1: had also moved to the US. In Grenada, Frederick had
Speaker 1: been their town's first police constable and later he bought
Speaker 1: a managed a store, so he was a respected and
Speaker 1: successful person there, and they sold that store and most
Speaker 1: of their possessions so that they could afford to buy
Speaker 1: passage to the US. And their hope was that they
Speaker 1: would make more money here in the U s where
Speaker 1: we are than they could at home, and that then
Speaker 1: they would kind of save that money and then go
Speaker 1: back home with it right. But once they arrived, they
Speaker 1: unfortunately did not find the plentiful work and good pay
Speaker 1: that they were hoping for. Byron's experience back in Grenado
Speaker 1: wasn't enough to overcome the fact that he was both
Speaker 1: black and an immigrant, so they really had a hard
Speaker 1: time finding employment. They were facing racism and discrimination wherever
Speaker 1: they looked, and they finally wound up getting jobs at
Speaker 1: the Waldorf Astoria. Frederick worked as a laborer unloading trucks,
Speaker 1: and Linda worked as a maid, which was a job
Speaker 1: that she had to pass for white to be able
Speaker 1: to get When the hotel closed, Frederick got a job
Speaker 1: pushing an apple cart, and Linda continued to pass as
Speaker 1: a white woman so she could get another job as
Speaker 1: a maid, letting her employer believe that in fact, she
Speaker 1: was Spanish. She kept this job until Frederick, who could
Speaker 1: not pass for white, picked up her paycheck for her
Speaker 1: one day because she was sick, and her employer, upon
Speaker 1: discovering this, immediately fired her. Hard to even say those words.
Speaker 1: That's there's a lot of this story. It's hard to say.
Speaker 1: The Great Depression came shortly after that, and Audrey's parents
Speaker 1: reconciled themselves to the idea that it just wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be feasible for them to go back to Granada
Speaker 1: for a while, and in fact, they never were able
Speaker 1: to move back. So Audrey was raised by immigrant parents
Speaker 1: who didn't feel like they were at home where they lived.
Speaker 1: Her mother especially considered Granada and not New York to
Speaker 1: be her home. Linda spoke of Granada often to her daughter.
Speaker 1: She made it sound beautiful, romantic and idyllic, and you know,
Speaker 1: it overlooked many of its problematic issues of colonialism and
Speaker 1: race was definitely a very romantic sized view of it
Speaker 1: that Linda was portraying to her kids, and all of
Speaker 1: this fueled audrey sense of separateness and identity. So the
Speaker 1: Lord's started a family, and Frederick started studying real estate
Speaker 1: in night school, eventually starting his own reasonably successful real
Speaker 1: estate business. The first of Audrey's two older sisters was
Speaker 1: born in ninety nine and the second in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 1: Audrey herself was born Audrey with a Why It's later
Speaker 1: spelled with no why but Audrey Geraldine Lord on February eighteenth,
Speaker 1: thirty four, and as the baby of the family, Audrey
Speaker 1: naturally got a lot of attention. She also had a
Speaker 1: number of physical problems. She actually didn't speak until she
Speaker 1: was about four years old, and when she did start
Speaker 1: to talk, she actually had a stutter. Her eyesight was poor,
Speaker 1: and she had to wear corrective shoes. So she was
Speaker 1: the baby of the family and was, you know, really
Speaker 1: attended to in a lot of ways. Her sisters, who
Speaker 1: already had a close relationship to each other, grew resentful
Speaker 1: of all the attention that she was getting, both for
Speaker 1: being the youngest and because she had other special needs.
Speaker 1: So Audrey grew up feeling distant from her sisters and
Speaker 1: kind of excluded from this world that the two of
Speaker 1: them shared with each other. But she also felt a
Speaker 1: degree of distance from her parents as well. Both of
Speaker 1: them were quite strict and emotionally pretty reserved, and she
Speaker 1: saw from a very early age her mother's own racism.
Speaker 1: In Granada, she had lived within a racial hierarchy in
Speaker 1: which people with light skin were much more valued than
Speaker 1: people with darker skin, and as someone who could pass
Speaker 1: for white, Audrey's mother was in a very privileged class
Speaker 1: of Granada uh, and she looked down on people who
Speaker 1: were darker than she was, even though her husband, Byron,
Speaker 1: was in fact darker. This sense of being better also
Speaker 1: affected how the lords lived in the United States. African
Speaker 1: American music and dance that her parents considered common were
Speaker 1: banned from the house, and all of the these elements
Speaker 1: together really made Audrey feel like an outsider in her
Speaker 1: own home and also in the rest of the outside world.
Speaker 1: And combined with that, she was also a bit rebellious
Speaker 1: and willful as a child. She would push back against
Speaker 1: her parents rules all the time. Uh, you know, the
Speaker 1: boundaries they would try to set up for her as
Speaker 1: a child, she would buck against and this makes her
Speaker 1: later role as an activist constantly challenging social norms pretty unsurprising. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the foundation for that was laid very early on in
Speaker 1: her life. Her personality was still rebellious and sometimes even
Speaker 1: obstinate by the time she got to school. And that's
Speaker 1: also when she dropped the letter why from the end
Speaker 1: of her first name. That happened during penmanship class. She
Speaker 1: just didn't like the way that it looked there, and
Speaker 1: so she just took it off and like dropping it
Speaker 1: below the line. Perhaps No, Her sense of being an
Speaker 1: outsider continued as she grew up, and when she was
Speaker 1: about eleven, the family moved to another part of Harlem
Speaker 1: that was at the time mostly white, and they were
Speaker 1: actually the first black family on their locke and Audrey
Speaker 1: was the only black student in her Catholic school and
Speaker 1: she was not happy there. She didn't fit in and
Speaker 1: she was teased and ridiculed by her peers because of
Speaker 1: her race. So she never really had like that sense
Speaker 1: of belonging or community anywhere. Yeah, not at that point.
Speaker 1: They the kids in her school made fun of her
Speaker 1: hair and they told her she smelled bad and it
Speaker 1: was just all kinds of things that that people were saying,
Speaker 1: we're because she was black, and all of it made
Speaker 1: for not a happy experience at all. And eventually, as
Speaker 1: a result of the harassment that she was facing at
Speaker 1: her school, her parents let her apply to Hunter College
Speaker 1: High School, which is a school for academically gifted students.
Speaker 1: It still exists today, but at the time it was
Speaker 1: an all girls school and Audrey started going there in
Speaker 1: While she was still in the minority there in terms
Speaker 1: of race, she was much more among peers academically speaking,
Speaker 1: she fit in better and she was able to begin
Speaker 1: building a community of female friends around her, and being
Speaker 1: part of this female community was something that would continue
Speaker 1: to be important to Audrey for the rest of her life.
Speaker 1: Audrey had been reading and reciting poems since she was
Speaker 1: really really young, and sometimes she would even communicate in poems.
Speaker 1: She would recite a poem that expressed what she was
Speaker 1: feeling or thinking rather than using her own words, and
Speaker 1: when she was studying at Hunter, she also started writing
Speaker 1: more of her own poetry and sharing that work with
Speaker 1: other girls, which is another thing that became a lifelong
Speaker 1: theme with her, and she became part of a tight
Speaker 1: knit group of students that came to be known as
Speaker 1: the Branded. Among other things, they met before school to
Speaker 1: read their poems to one another, and Audrey was the
Speaker 1: only black student in the group. Most of her black
Speaker 1: friends still lived in Harlem and they went to other schools.
Speaker 1: She also had her first poem published while she was
Speaker 1: at Hunter. She had learned about sonnets by reading the
Speaker 1: work of Edna st. Vincent Malay, which she loved and
Speaker 1: we love so that's very exciting um. She wrote and
Speaker 1: submitted a love sonnet to the school literary magazine, and
Speaker 1: the magazine rejected it. The note that came back said
Speaker 1: that she should not aspire to being a centualist, and
Speaker 1: Audrey's interpretation was that the faculty advisor didn't like what
Speaker 1: she had said in the poem, not that the poem
Speaker 1: itself wasn't good. So she sent it to seventeen magazine,
Speaker 1: which accepted and published it in it paid her for it,
Speaker 1: so she got paid in addition to the fact that
Speaker 1: she had been published before she even got out of
Speaker 1: high school. She started to question her sexual orientation while
Speaker 1: it Hunter. Also she started to have crushes on female
Speaker 1: classmates and teachers. She also had a close and physical
Speaker 1: but not sexual relationship with a girl named Genevieve, who
Speaker 1: tragically committed suicide in nineteen fifty when she was just
Speaker 1: just shy of sixteen years old. After Genevieve's death, Audrey
Speaker 1: was really grief, grief stricken and felt horribly guilty about
Speaker 1: the whole thing, really really sort of soul searching about
Speaker 1: whether there was something she could have done to prevent
Speaker 1: it from happening. And in her later teens, she dated
Speaker 1: both men and women, and all of the people that
Speaker 1: she dated were white. She mostly kept her romantic relationships
Speaker 1: with girls a secret, but her parents knew that she
Speaker 1: was dating white boys and they were not happy about it.
Speaker 1: When she was seventeen, she started dating a white boy
Speaker 1: named Jerry Levine, and this was a huge source of
Speaker 1: tension between Audrey and her family. Audrey graduated from high
Speaker 1: school in ninette and she had wanted to go to
Speaker 1: Sarah Lawrence College, but her parents couldn't afford it. Sarah
Speaker 1: Lawrence is and wasn't very expensive, and her father had
Speaker 1: had a series of heart attacks and was no longer
Speaker 1: in good health. But Audrey felt like that they could
Speaker 1: have made it work if they had wanted to, and
Speaker 1: they were deliberately not supporting her education. This plus years
Speaker 1: of strained family relationships combined made her really really who
Speaker 1: you want to get out of her parents house, and
Speaker 1: so she decided to get a job and put herself
Speaker 1: through Hunter College, the college that was affiliated with her
Speaker 1: high school for gifted students. She got a night shift
Speaker 1: job as a nurse's aid at a hospital, just no
Speaker 1: easy job, so she really wanted out. Uh. She moved
Speaker 1: out of her parents home after a huge argument with
Speaker 1: her sister, during which her mother had threatened to call
Speaker 1: the police, and Audrey viewed this as burning her bridges
Speaker 1: and just starting a new part of her life on
Speaker 1: her own. And I think it's worked out to be
Speaker 1: more difficult than she was expecting it to be. She
Speaker 1: really struggled as she started college because the break with
Speaker 1: her family had wound up being harder on her than
Speaker 1: she expected. Her father's seriously ill health was also a
Speaker 1: big strain to her. Her relationship with Jerry, which she'd
Speaker 1: always felt kind of conflicted over, started to unravel. She
Speaker 1: finally lost her job one day after not showing up
Speaker 1: for work, and her father had another heart attack. All
Speaker 1: the things together prompted her to go into therapy, and
Speaker 1: she would be in therapy at various points for most
Speaker 1: of the rest of her life. And then in nine two,
Speaker 1: right before she turned eighteen, Audrey discovered that she was
Speaker 1: pregnant and she underwent an illegal abortion. Audrey found herself
Speaker 1: less at home at Hunter College than she had been
Speaker 1: at Hunter High School. You know, at the high school,
Speaker 1: it was in an all girls community. Uh, that is
Speaker 1: not the case with the college. She didn't feel like
Speaker 1: she had the close knit community of support that she
Speaker 1: had had and enjoyed having in high school. She started
Speaker 1: going back and forth to Harlem to attend meetings of
Speaker 1: the Harlem Writers Guild, and in the fall she dropped
Speaker 1: out of Hunter entirely and moved to Connecticut. She worked
Speaker 1: for a little while at an electronics company, which was
Speaker 1: a job that exposed her to both dangerous chemicals and radiation,
Speaker 1: before deciding to travel to Mexico. A friend's fiancee, who
Speaker 1: was a painter, had lived there, and hearing the stories
Speaker 1: about it prompted her to want to go there herself.
Speaker 1: So she arrived at Mexico at the age of twenty,
Speaker 1: but at first she lived in hotels in Mexico City,
Speaker 1: and she enrolled in classes at the National University of Mexico.
Speaker 1: Then she started to meet friends of friends whose names
Speaker 1: had been given to her before she left New York,
Speaker 1: and one of these was Freedom Matthews, known as Freddie,
Speaker 1: who lived in Cuernavaca, home to a lot of creative expatriates.
Speaker 1: Audrey moved there after a visit and commuted back and
Speaker 1: forth to class. I'm not sure how long this drive
Speaker 1: would have taken at the time. Google Maps thinks it's
Speaker 1: more than an hour today. So she was dedicated to
Speaker 1: the idea of both being in this community and in school.
Speaker 1: Her time in Mexico really set the stage for a
Speaker 1: lot of her later life. She wrote really prolifically and
Speaker 1: kind of stretched her ability as a writer. She also
Speaker 1: became part of a community of women and had her
Speaker 1: first really public relationship with another woman. Her name was
Speaker 1: Edora Garrett, and she was a journalist who was twenty
Speaker 1: seven years older than Audrey was. Audrey had been in
Speaker 1: relationships with women before, but it was in Mexico that
Speaker 1: she really began to think of herself as a lesbian.
Speaker 1: Eudora was also the first woman that Audrey had ever
Speaker 1: met who had had a mastectomy after a breast cancer,
Speaker 1: and she chose not to wear a breast pro prosthesis,
Speaker 1: which was a choice that Audrey would also make in
Speaker 1: her own life later on, so it was likely influential,
Speaker 1: even though at the time she probably wasn't thinking of
Speaker 1: it as such. So do you want to take a
Speaker 1: moment to have a word from our sponsor? Yes, I do,
Speaker 1: and now let's get back to our discussion of Audrey Lord.
Speaker 1: Audrey went back to the United States and the next
Speaker 1: year went back to Hunter College. Back in the States,
Speaker 1: she went through the nineteen fifties and a pretty closeted life.
Speaker 1: She did become part of the lesbian bar scene and
Speaker 1: continuing this theme of being an outsider, most of the
Speaker 1: bars were owned by white people and had a predominantly
Speaker 1: white clientele, so she didn't really she's kind of an
Speaker 1: outsider in that context. She also didn't fit exclusively into
Speaker 1: either a butch or fem identity, which the bar scene
Speaker 1: at the time viewed people who didn't go into one
Speaker 1: of those buckets with a lot of suspicion and derision.
Speaker 1: In uh late nineteen fifty seven or early Audrey began
Speaker 1: seeing a therapist due to loneliness, uh poor sleeping, and
Speaker 1: feeling frustrated with her own emotional barriers. Her therapist died
Speaker 1: unexpectedly though, in March of ninety eight, just before the
Speaker 1: anniversary of Audrey's friend Genevieve's death, and she became deeply
Speaker 1: depressed and sought further therapy for a depression that she
Speaker 1: herself described as nearly suicidal. Audrey was able to finish school, though,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen fifty nine she got a be a
Speaker 1: from Hunter College and entered Columbia University. She got a
Speaker 1: Master of Library Science at Columbia in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: and she went on to become a librarian. She became
Speaker 1: the only black person working as a professional in the
Speaker 1: Mountain Vernon Public Library in New York, and with this job,
Speaker 1: she was able to move into her an apartment and
Speaker 1: have a secure professional and financial life, and this gave
Speaker 1: her a lot of freedom, which she had always been craving,
Speaker 1: and she had a number of intense emotional and physical relationships.
Speaker 1: She developed a social circle of other writers and activists,
Speaker 1: and her life at this point was sort of a
Speaker 1: cycle of late nights with friends and partners, followed by
Speaker 1: caffeine and amphetamines the next day to stay awake. Uh.
Speaker 1: She continued her amphetamine use until she became pregnant with
Speaker 1: her first child, so it really did become quite habitual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And she was also becoming an increasingly visible presence in
Speaker 1: the feminist community. Second wave feminism hadn't really gotten its
Speaker 1: start quite yet. That was still to come a little
Speaker 1: bit later, but there were still many feminist thinkers and
Speaker 1: writers and speakers, and she became more and more prevalent one.
Speaker 1: Although this term had not been coined yet and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be coined for another thirty years. Her thoughts on
Speaker 1: feminism were really deeply rooted in the content the concept
Speaker 1: of intersectionality, which is the interlocking and overlapping patterns of
Speaker 1: discrimination based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, all sorts
Speaker 1: of other facets of a person's identity. Um Intersectionality is
Speaker 1: a theme that's come to the forefront of the feminist
Speaker 1: movement again recently. You can listen to our colleagues on
Speaker 1: Stuff Mom Never Told You talk about it, and the
Speaker 1: recent episode is Solidarity for White Women, which also talks
Speaker 1: about Audrey Lord. Uh. So that is the end of
Speaker 1: part one on Audrey Lord, and then the next episode
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about how her feminist and political
Speaker 1: views led her to becoming a wife and mother and
Speaker 1: her career as a teacher and a poet that followed that.
Speaker 1: So there's more to come on Audrey Lord. Uh, do
Speaker 1: you have a listener mail for us to have listener
Speaker 1: mail fire away? I have two pieces of listener mail.
Speaker 1: They are both about our Mendez Versus Westminster podcast. The
Speaker 1: first one is from Colleen, and Colleen says, Hi, Tracy
Speaker 1: and Holly, I just finish listening to your podcast on
Speaker 1: Mendes Versus Westminster, and I really enjoyed it. I grew
Speaker 1: up in southern California and never really learned about that
Speaker 1: part of California's history. You mentioned the schools for the
Speaker 1: Mexican American children didn't have cafeterias, and while I can't
Speaker 1: speak for that time, today it's very common for kids
Speaker 1: to eat outside at picnic tables at all schools, public
Speaker 1: and private, although not near the smell of manure. I
Speaker 1: went to three different private schools from kindergarten through high school,
Speaker 1: and none of them had cafeterias. It very rarely rains
Speaker 1: and is generally moderate temperatures. A few days a year
Speaker 1: it did rain, we had to eat in the classrooms
Speaker 1: and hallways. I didn't realize this was unusual until recently
Speaker 1: when I moved to a colder and rainier climate. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for all of the interesting podcasts. Keep
Speaker 1: up the good work, Calleen. We got a couple of
Speaker 1: notes about the presence of cafeterias. Yeah, so thank you
Speaker 1: for sending that. I had no idea. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think we both grew up in areas that would
Speaker 1: have needed them. Yes, well, like I think my parents generation,
Speaker 1: often schools were close enough to people's homes that there
Speaker 1: were schools or didn't have cafeterias because kids would walk
Speaker 1: home and happens at home. Um, not everywhere, but some places.
Speaker 1: I think that's less common today, uh than before. But yes,
Speaker 1: thank you for that. I have another one following that
Speaker 1: short clarification, and this is from Emily. Emily says, Hi,
Speaker 1: Holly and Tracy. I enjoyed learning about Mendez versus Westminster.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Orange County, and I never knew
Speaker 1: that those events ever happened. It was darkly funny to
Speaker 1: me that the Mendez family got the asparagus farm from
Speaker 1: a family that was suffering because of another frequently glossed
Speaker 1: over part of California history, Japanese interment camps. I found
Speaker 1: that to be also kind of yeah to go on.
Speaker 1: There is so much racial tension that still goes on
Speaker 1: in southern California and white communities, Latinos are seen as gardeners,
Speaker 1: day laborers, nanny's and house cleaners. If a white suburb
Speaker 1: night has some intense yard work to do on the weekend,
Speaker 1: he might say, I don't think I can do this
Speaker 1: on my own. I think I'm going to go buy
Speaker 1: the home depot and pick up some Mexicans to help me.
Speaker 1: There will be Latino day laborers hanging around the parking
Speaker 1: lot of home depot so they can make some cash.
Speaker 1: I just don't know what to make of that situation.
Speaker 1: They're illegal immigration issues that go into that, a lack
Speaker 1: of long term employment for those men, and then the
Speaker 1: attitude of going to home depot to pick up some
Speaker 1: people that are now commodities like bags of fertilizer, except
Speaker 1: more helpful. I just wish everybody would have the equal
Speaker 1: opportunity to be successful and respected. Anybody that says the
Speaker 1: US is a post racial society is deluded. I wish
Speaker 1: we could learn more about California's transformation from being part
Speaker 1: of Mexico to a state in the United States. It
Speaker 1: is not difficult to be reminded that Los Angeles is
Speaker 1: ex Mexico, but in school, we're never taught about that
Speaker 1: legacy in detail. I don't want it but little how
Speaker 1: important the civil rights movement in the South was. But
Speaker 1: the students in Orange County it's three thousand miles away
Speaker 1: and fifty years ago. I've learned about our local history too,
Speaker 1: so we can be since of up to all of
Speaker 1: the issues that are still with us today. You guys
Speaker 1: are awesome. Thank you, Emily. I would like to say
Speaker 1: that southern California is not the only place where day
Speaker 1: labors exist as a as a commodity. Yeah, they're still
Speaker 1: pretty common here as well, and I know in other places.
Speaker 1: So I couldn't speak holistically for the entire country, but
Speaker 1: I know in Georgia, Florida, and even northern climbs, I
Speaker 1: have seen or heard of these the same situation happening. Right.
Speaker 1: I lived down the street from a home depot used
Speaker 1: to so yeah, I agree that there is a giant
Speaker 1: confluence of ethnicity and lack of economic opportunity and law
Speaker 1: all coming together uh and would probably be material for
Speaker 1: many more of casts could be We will see If
Speaker 1: you would like to write to us about this episode
Speaker 1: or anything else you can. We were at History Podcast
Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com. We are also on Facebook at
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash history class stuff and on Twitter
Speaker 1: at misst in history are tumbler is missed in History
Speaker 1: dot tumbler dot com, and we are also on Pinterest.
Speaker 1: If you would like to learn more about something we
Speaker 1: just started talking about today, you can go to our website.
Speaker 1: Put the word feminism in the search bar and you
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