by Martín Granada
- USA -

One of the first times I ever saw my mother cry was the night Reagan was elected president. She cloistered herself in her bathroom and drank an uncustomary glass of wine. I found her crying with her face in her hands. After unsuccessfully trying to conceal her wineglass, she sobbed, "Ronald Reagan won! Ronald Reagan, every time I hear his name I think of Donald Duck. Our country has elected Donald Duck as the president!"

At the time I didn't understand what she meant, however, several months later I began to catch on when my mother began dying her hair with a product called Loving Care. Every time it came out too dark, she asked me if she looked like Ronald Reagan.

Shortly after Reagan came into office, my father lost his job as an affirmative action officer and the neighborhood where my mother taught elementary school transformed. Every morning the school janitors began having to sweep away pipes and needles from the playground. My mother transferred me to a private school, closer to home. Though I lived in a safe community, in a four bedroom house, whenever I watched President Reagan speak on the television, I wondered how he could justify that all was well? Didn't he see all that I saw?

by Martín Granada
- USA -

Powell and Market Streets, in San Francisco, where the cable-cars turn, is the intersection of the city’s heart and gut in a melee of consumerism, poverty, street-art, soggy gutters, and timeless elegance. The lampposts of Powell and Market preside over red bricks in green rod iron, filigreed with curlicues and old San Francisco charm. At the cable-car turn around, from dawn ‘til dusk, a man named José twists a piece of neon green cardboard on a pole reminding Jesus Loves Us. Yet this is a place where you don’t smile, you don’t make eye contact. Slow moving tourists with shopping bags and cameras might take it all in, even the garbage, but they don’t make eye contact. Even my friend Hester, sporting over-sized sunglasses, rushed right by me until I bleated out her name several times. “You don’t want to make eye contact down here,” she told me.