** Spoiler Alert: Watch Netflix’s Gentefied before reading or read at your own risk.**
As I write this, I am taking yet another incredibly necessary break from a project that makes me feel like a sell-out. I write a sentence of copy, gag a little at the idea of what I’m writing about, and take a 20-minute pause to pretend like I have a choice in the matter.
I recently binge-watched the first season of Netflix’s Gentefied, a story of the lives of a Mexican-American immigrant family struggling to make it in LA’s Boyle Heights. With their neighborhood growing ever more gentrified and their landlord threatening to evict them from the taco shop their grandparents established more than 30 years ago, these three cousins (Ana, Eric, and Chris) do what they can to make ends meet. Part of it is using opportunities afforded to them by the same people pricing them out of their neighborhood.
My family never owned a taco shop, nor did we ever eat a taco that wasn’t from Taco Bell. I’m also not from LA. But I see my own life in so many of the situations the Morales family finds themselves in. I’m a brown, Cuban/Ecuadorian woman, born in New York City and raised in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Miami.
Thankfully, my parents own their home, but I’m watching the neighborhood I grew up in change and slowly become gentrified. It started with a brand new Walmart, and now there are 7 Elevens and coffee shops that don’t serve cafecitos and croquetas through a ventanita.
I still live with my parents, though I’ve been married for about 7 months now. My husband is an adjunct professor at two local universities, and we run a business together. We work hard, we’re saving as much as we possibly can, but we couldn’t dream of even affording a fraction of the home my parents bought for so little just 30 years ago. We probably couldn’t even afford the tiny foreclosed house down the street that resembles a yard shed and probably hasn’t seen a new roof since it was built.
This isn’t quite Boyle Heights, but I’m faced with a lot of the same dilemmas the characters in Gentefied face. Putting my values aside and selling out for money is the one that hurts the most. Like Ana taking thousands from a gentrifying landlord to paint a mural on the side of an old Mexican liquor store he’s trying to run out of business, or Eric and Chris using a protest outside the taco shop to draw in a crowd of hipsters with money, I’m crossing myself to earn my way out of this quasi-poverty I’ve been dealt.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading through our client’s self-aggrandizing “about me” statements and her non-profit, which seeks to “glorify God”. To what end, I don’t know. I don’t see a purpose to her cause, and I don’t see what good it could possibly do. It will probably do more harm than good, and I find myself asking God for forgiveness every time I sit down to work on the copy for her website. She’s a paying client, and I am a professional, but my goodness do I hate what she’s about.
Had I known what I was getting myself into from the beginning, I would have turned her away, but like Ana, I had no idea what the project was about when we started and once I figured it out I was in too deep. I could refund the money and part ways, but like Ana’s client, my client has the power to end everything I’ve worked so hard to attain. She even has a picture of herself clapping while standing in front of the very president that threatens to send some of my loved ones back to a country they haven’t seen in 20+ years.
My “radical” ideals of love, justice and freedom for all (not just those who can afford it) are in complete contradiction of the work I’m doing for this client. And my freedom depends on shutting my mouth and just getting the work done, despite how much I want to say “fuck it” and tell my client to take her White Ethnostate money and shove it. Unfortunately, her White money is the same currency I pay my bills with.
I look forward to the day where I can tell a client I won’t do any work that contradicts the values I hold dear and that losing their business won’t affect me negatively. I look forward to the day I can stand entirely on my own two feet, in a home I bought with money I earned as ethically as I could. I look forward to the day I no longer have to be complicit in my own oppression in order to survive and make a life for myself.
Until then, I will try my best to make better choices in the projects I take, but I can’t guarantee I’ll win all the battles.