Mike: Yeah. Teletech. I had to quit though because I was moving. I didn't have enough money, because I feel like over here when people know that you're not from here—or that you're from over there—they take advantage. And I feel like my dad kind of took advantage of me. He basically said that things were one price, but they were totally different.
Return to Mexico, Jobs, Call Centers, Dead End
Mike: It was gang members. I used to hang out with people that they didn't care for themselves. I remember walking into my friend's house and the house was just like, "Oh my God." It was like a tornado went in and I usually don't hang out with people like this. I was so scared just being in that house and I just started getting used to it, because those are the people that I could not relate to, but I had something in common like, "Okay if you're not ish, then I'm not an ish either."Mike: So we relate and I feel like kind of adopted. They kind of adopted me. The streets adopted me kind of in a way. I didn't really have a relationship with my family. When there was a family events or anything, I felt like an outcast. I would never go to them. Christmas, I was always in my room. Every little... It's just weird man. Everything messed me up. I feel like traumatic. Just the trauma of everything.
Time in the US, Gangs, Camaraderie/Family
Annotation, as critical writing, is a literal, symbolic, and social means of re- marking upon and speaking truth to power.
This has me thinking about how social annotation performs a kind of "estrangement" that maybe breaks down boundaries between the creation/publication and the reception/reading of texts when words from the authors and readers intermix in the same experience.
A few years ago, there was a boom of articles called “If it happened there,” imagining how the American press would cover this-or-that story if it happened in another country. How would we cover the government shutdown if it happened in another country? The Ferguson protests? The Oregon militia siege? George Floyd’s murder? Mike Bloomberg? Slate’s Joshua Keating popularized the form, but other outlets, including Vox, deployed it. The intent was to use the tropes of foreign coverage to create a sense of what the literary critic Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement” — severing us from the familiarity and overconfidence that can dull our awareness of extraordinary events.
this is an interesting thought experiment