What I learned in Philly's 14th Ward about language, class and the interfaces of political power

This is cross-posted at TechPresident

Yesterday I wrote about getting Lost In Hillaryland while driving down to Philadelphia to volunteer for the Obama campaign. In that post at Kenneth Cole’s Awearness Blog, I write about how after the mini-adventure of the day, my oldest came to the same conclusion as Joe Trippi : that Obama was going to lose.

My son’s observation was the most interesting part of the whole trip because it lent credit to my recent thinking of “politics as interface”.

Let’s look quickly at the definition of interface :

in·ter·face
(ĭn'tər-fās') Pronunciation Key
n.
1. A surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases.

2. A point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact: "the interface between crime and politics where much of our reality is to be found" (Jack Kroll).

3. Computer Science

1. The point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.
2. The layout of an application's graphic or textual controls in conjunction with the way the application responds to user activity: an interface whose icons were hard to remember.

An interface is a “surface forming a common boundary”, a space that is not only a common space but a mesh of space and communication. As the Java handbook to object-oriented programming explains rather well, an interface is not just the end result of a design process. Interfaces don’t come from the outside of the software process. It is part of the process itself.

So the surface that creates a common boundary is not outside two distinctive people or two distinctive groups. An interface is not something that is given to a “user”. An interface is a meshing of actions or simply put, it’s a two way street.

“Politics as interface” would be the meshing of actions, states of beings and phases between individuals, groups or even systems negotiating power. As a space of communication and as a meshing of actions, states of beings, wills and desires for power, politics as interface is developed all the time.

Politics as interface in Hillaryland is in the box of buckshot lighters gracing the gas station attendant’s counter. Politics as interface in Hillaryland is certainly the senior women holding posters saying “Honk for Hillary”.

Yet Politics as interface in Hillaryland was the absence of sidewalks down Cedar Road, the expansive manicured front lawns with their mansions in the background and the “Hillary” signs cleaving the dirt in the foreground. It was the absence of white people in the small crowds waiting with exhausted looks on their faces for the bus to come. And it was certainly the meshing sights on the road to Philly of million dollar mansions, to quaint family homes to the “We buy ugly houses” signs next to boarded up brownstones and row after row after row of broken down and abandoned buildings on North Broad Street.

When we got lost in Hillaryland, my son was very keen and very much aware of who had the upper hand in expressing power. And it became even more obvious to him when we went canvassing on the 14th Ward.

Only a few houses had any signs of political engagement. We were bringing the engagement from the outside, not only as out-of-state volunteers, but in the manner of posters and signage as well.

From an immediate impression one could say that political interfaces in the 14th Ward didn’t exist because there was no visible ownership of the process of power meshing and communication. Yet in reality the interface of politics was riddled with bugs that rendered it useless. One of those bugs was the operating language itself.

When we got to the 14th Ward, my guide and me came across 3 volunteers of the SEIU who had just canvassed the area. They did so quickly because, and I quote, “we don’t speak Spanish and couldn’t interact with the people”.

Now, even though we have many federal, state and local documents translated for the sake of complying with anti-discrimination laws, historically this country has punished people for linguistic diversity. It’s the reason why the 19th and early 20th century immigrants gave up on their native languages. “Assimilation” was meant to be the onus of looking and sounding as much as the mythical White Anglo-Saxon and Protestant power elites.

Then Puerto Ricans happened unto the scene. Puerto Ricans are the “immigrants with citizenship” of the United States. A non-state and a non-sovereignty that redefined colonialism, it also was a little country with a long history of freedom fighters. Puerto Ricans became in many ways the bugs* in the political and social interfaces of this country.

Puerto Ricans are a proud people that many Americans consider arrogant, even ungrateful because many of us won’t give up nor renounce our own particular ways of engaging with political and social interfaces. So some Puerto Ricans not only walk away from “gringo” political interfaces by choice, they become marginalized because the assumption is that they are too illiterate, too uneducated, too clueless to use them.

The assumption that citizens who walk away from the political process don’t know how to use it in the first place and so have to be ‘educated’, sounds a lot like the clichéd excuses engineers give for software or hardware that people can't use properly.

There is a certain open-source project that even though is an outstanding content management system, it was known many years in the OSS community as being software designed with arrogance in mind. The developers didn’t want to contend with the complaints of those who could use the software that for every one of them 10 or 20 more people would probably use their product if they made it easier to use. On the contrary, the developers would say that it was the users problem if they couldn’t use the software and they would either attribute the usability problem to the users’ lack of education or as one developer once said : “well if they can’t use it then they ought not to be using it”. Grock forbid that it was the inability of the developers to establish a working interface the problem.

So, to go back to the 14th Ward, when my son saw the enthusiasm with which people would engage me in deep political debate he knew something was broken. At one point both my kids said, “This feels like we’re in Puerto Rico”, especially after we heard a rooster in the distance. It felt like Puerto Rico because, although the women who were with me canvassing knew some Spanish, not only were they young, they were obviously not from the island. They were respectful and helpful but I am Puerto Rican woman with a seriously ‘rican accent, shlepping my two boys. I am a matriarch and a member of the “tribe”.

In other words, I am a debugged element of the interface. In the few hours we were there, I made the interface of politics work.

For example, I probably wouldn’t have done this 20 years ago, of walking into a auto-repair shop full of sweaty Puerto Rican men and start debating the merits of staying out of the political process. I obviously am against it, but my debaters vigorously defended their right not to vote in this country and I was not done after 30 minutes of intense discussion and debate. And I stayed on not only because I was passionate about it, but because they were listening. They were engaged and passionate. My being older, having more than a few pounds of me 20 years later and 2 boys scooting from house to house and knocking on people's doors gave an aura of authority that probably they don't see on a daily basis in a woman. Yet it was my staying there debating and respecting their opinions that, just like one of the guys said, maybe only happens to them once every election cycle.

These guys may live in this poverty stricken neighborhood but, my god, they’re neither poor of skills nor of education. It is not a reason to treat them without deference and respect.

My kids felt we were back home because Puerto Ricans are intense political animals and as a country we devour the political comings and goings of the rest of the world. Political talk radio is HUGE in Puerto Rico and in every café, every bodega, every corner where there are more than two people the conversation will almost invariably end in a political discussion. Heck, there are even signs in cafeterias were it says, “If you want to fight about politics, get out”.

Yet politics as an interface is broken in the 14th Ward. The streets are broken up, many houses are boarded up and some are even caving. Broken glass and trash was every where. Vacant lots were covered with refuse. The whole area looked like a corner of Baghdad.

Politics as an interface is broken in the 14th Ward because as long as the pre-requisite for engagement and is loss of identity and assimilation, the interface of politics with Latinos and especially Puerto Ricans will simply not work.

This has been to me what’s missing in the Obama campaign.

Obama really didn’t need to target all Latinos. Let Hillary have her middle-aged Puerto Rican abuelitas and Tejanos. Obama needs to target my generation, the generation Xers, the 40 somethings. There are just not enough Latino endorsements, and for that matter passionate users for the Obama campaign that will make my generation prick up their ears and pay attention.

Obama needs to get people like Willie Colón or Rubén Blades, Nydia Velázquez or José Serrano, Ana Lydia Vega or Luis Rafael Sánchez. These are cultural and political ambassadors that matter to izquierdistas and progressives within our communities because they’ve created powerful political and social interfaces with their art and their activism and made their fans active participants and engaged users.

So, if there is anything I learned about getting lost in Hillaryland is was that Obamaites are going to have to hit not only the “gun toting, bible thumping” bitter white working class voters of the Poconos or Appalachia. They will need to work out the kinks of their campaign’s political intefaces and do the same for the “bitter white” voters’ urban counterparts : The very brown, very Latino and very bitter 14th Wards of the United States.

The Obama campaign needs to learn to not only use the operating languages of places like the 14th Ward. They will need to debug and redesign their interfaces in order to turn disengaged voters like the Puerto Rican mechanics I debated with, into “passionate users” of their new system of politics.

In other words, don't believe the hype that it's only the Millennials who function within the context of a politics of remixing and mashups. Coming out of the autoshop, where they were not just fixing cars but doing their local version of Pimp My Ride, it occurred to me that to make it possible for these guys to not just engage but to take ownership of their political power, they needed to be able to strip the interfaces and use them and remix them in whatever way they like.

The future of DIY politics is not just in the hands of millennials. There is a reason why Pimp My Ride didn't happen before most millennials could vote.

I think the Obama campaign in Philadelphia needed, if anything, an Xzibit intervention. At least he crosses over the language, culture, age, class and race divides that still effect our political process.

___________

* NOTA BENE *
It was right as I was writing that sentence that I realize how it is
an offensive pun. Puerto Ricans have been historically derided as
the bugs, the "cucarachas" you couldn't get rid of in the inner city.
I appropriated it exactly because of it's double meaning.

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