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Posts Tagged ‘September 11’

Remembering and Not Forgetting

9:21 am By Maegan La Mala · Chile|history|New York City · Comments Off

11 Sep 2011

I have written about 9-11 for as long as this website has been in existence. I remember to write about it every year because my head and my heart do not forget. They are two separate things – remembering and not forgetting but they are the same in that they are both subjective, victims of our own age, our biases, our challenges.

I remember being stuck underground for hours in a subway car that filled with smoke and darkness, not knowing that the World Trade Center was collapsing above me and that my mother was running just ahead of it.

I remember walking the streets from downtown to Queens, half crying, half in a daze because an officer has told me at 14th Street that there was no more World Trade Center and I remember hearing that as there is no more mommy.

I remember my mother and I finally finding each other back home – she walked out of the World Trade Center and on that walk to Queens she thought I too was dead.

I remember kissing my then 4 year old daughter and trying to call Chile to let her father know we were ok but I will not forget that I was also checking to see if he was ok because his September 11th had happened already. He knew already of searching for bodies with pictures in the hands of mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, and children. He knew of checking and rechecking lists of names.

On 9-11-96 I will not forget that I first tasted and absorbed tear gas by the Universidad de Chile, surrounded by students whose families had their own planes, their own dead and disappeared. I will not forget that they eyed me with suspicion – gringa – Norte Americana – representative of the sponsor of their 9-11.

I will not forget how I have a whole generation of students who have grown up in the last 10 years being told to fear terrorism and that they, as Muslims, as brown are the terrorists.

I remember all the dead – the men and women I used to call almost on a daily basis from work who would answer from their top floor office in the WTC. The lists stacked floor to ceiling in the Vicaría de la Solidaridad de Chile of names, some shared by my Chile-Rican daughters.

They do not remember. One was a pre-schooler. The other wasn’t even a thought But they cannot forget that histories like memories are subjective and layer upon one another to form identity and policy and the space between truth and lie. I will not let them forget.

9-11 One Date : Multiple Tragedies

8:06 am By Maegan La Mala · Chile|history|New York City|Politics · 4 Comments

11 Sep 2008

I thought of writing something new for this 7 year anniversary of 9-11-01 here in NYC and the 35 year anniversary since the U.S. backed military coup in Chile, but I’ve said everything before and nothing has really changed. The U.S. is still invading nations, engaged in wars of imperial power y aqui en mi ciudad, whole communities live in fear of terrorists named ICE. So a repost.

Part of the personal struggle I deal with on 9-11 is the straddling of grief and confronting the egocentrism that is United States culture. In general people in the United States have short term memory. Selectively people remember and claim dates and tragedies as if they belonged to no one else before them. 9-11 is one of those dates.

Five years ago today I was on my way to my job in the financial district of Manhattan, blocks away from the World Trade Center. A man came into the subway at one point yelling something about planes hitting the Twin Towers. As one of a trainful of jaded New Yorkers, I ignored him. As long as the subways were still running , nothing was really wrong.

Minutes later as my train approached Canal Street and the conductor announced that the train would go no further, something became apparently wrong. While underground it was unclear the extent of what was happening above. I called my mother, who worked in one of the World Trade Center towers and no one answered. I soon was trapped for hours in a dark smoke filled subway car as the Twin Towers collapsed above me, as my mother watched bodies falling from those buildings and she ran for safety. For hours she thought I was dead. For hours I thought she was dead. Between us we lost collegues but not each other. We both walked from downtown Manhattan back home to Queens.

But 9-11-01 wasn’t my first 9-11 and it wasn’t the world’s either. 10 years ago I didn’t stayed holed up in a Providencia, Santiago de Chile apartment I shared with gringo college students. I went to the Universidad de Chile to remember what happened on 9-11-73, when democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet backed by the good ole U.S. of A.

My children, half Chilean, half Puerto Rican (which by default means United States citizens) carry these multiple tragedies in their blood line. My partner woke up this morning to watch not the numerous memorials on U.S. network television but to watch the commemoration of another fireball that was the Moneda palace. On 9-11, in different years, different buildings were on fire in different countries. Both led to secret prisons, summary arrests, murder and disapearances. Both remain linked forever by the same politics.

Fidel Castro Quotes Public Enemy : 9-11 Is a Joke

2:03 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Controversia|Cuba|Politics · 4 Comments

12 Sep 2007

Fidel Castro may be out of the public eye but he sure perking up ears with his ill timed comments about September 11, 2001 conspiracy theories.

In an essay read by a Cuban television presenter Tuesday night, Castro said the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.”Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation,”"Studying the impact of planes, similar to those that hit the Twin Towers, that had accidentally fallen on densely populated cities, one concludes that it was not a plane that crashed into the Pentagon,” Castro said.”Only a projectile could have caused the geometrically round hole that allegedly was made by the plane,” he said.”We were fooled like the rest of the planet’s inhabitants,” he wrote.

I know there are many out there who actually believe this theory but for a head of state to say it and on the anniversary? Just not nice.

Via / MSNBC

Should Undocumented Families of 9-11-01 Dead Be Given a Chance?

10:54 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Immigration|New York City|Politics · 1 Comment

11 Sep 2007

That’s exactly what H.R. 1071, The September 11 Family Humanitarian Relief and Patriotism Act attempts to do. Officially 11 undocumented workers died as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center (the number could be more). Those 11 victims (only one wasn’t Latino) left behind 19 family members, husbands, wives and children here in the United States. The act would:

Provide permanent resident status adjustment or cancellation of removal and permanent resident status adjustment for an applicant alien who was: (1) on September 10, 2001, the spouse, child, or dependent son or daughter of a lawful nonimmigrant alien who died as a result of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States; and (2) deemed to be a beneficiary of, and by, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001.

Is this akin to something like the Soriano case or is it as Republican Rep. Steve King from Iowa said earlier this year, a tragedy akin to a car crash, tragic but not one that should warrant exceptions in the law?

Via / El Diario / La Prensa and Washington Watch

September 11 Belongs to No One, Belongs to Everyone

7:00 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Chile|New York City|Politics · 7 Comments

11 Sep 2007

Having a group of Chilenos in my apartment last night reminded me again about the multiple layers behind the date September 11. Despite the United States and all the presidential hopefuls claiming ownership of the date and whoring it for multiple purposes, 9-11 belongs to no one country. But perhaps I said it best in my post from last year.

Part of the personal struggle I deal with on 9-11 is the straddling of grief and confronting the egocentrism that is United States culture. In general people in the United States have short term memory. Selectively people remember and claim dates and tragedies as if they belonged to no one else before them. 9-11 is one of those dates.

Five years ago today I was on my way to my job in the financial district of Manhattan, blocks away from the World Trade Center. A man came into the subway at one point yelling something about planes hitting the Twin Towers. As one of a trainful of jaded New Yorkers, I ignored him. As long as the subways were still running , nothing was really wrong.

Minutes later as my train approached Canal Street and the conductor announced that the train would go no further, something became apparently wrong. While underground it was unclear the extent of what was happening above. I called my mother, who worked in one of the World Trade Center towers and no one answered. I soon was trapped for hours in a dark smoke filled subway car as the Twin Towers collapsed above me, as my mother watched bodies falling from those buildings and she ran for safety. For hours she thought I was dead. For hours I thought she was dead. Between us we lost collegues but not each other. We both walked from downtown Manhattan back home to Queens.

But 9-11-01 wasn’t my first 9-11 and it wasn’t the world’s either. 10 years ago I didn’t stayed holed up in a Providencia, Santiago de Chile apartment I shared with gringo college students. I went to the Universidad de Chile to remember what happened on 9-11-73, when democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet backed by the good ole U.S. of A.

My children, half Chilean, half Puerto Rican (which by default means United States citizens) carry these multiple tragedies in their blood line. My partner woke up this morning to watch not the numerous memorials on U.S. network television but to watch the commemoration of another fireball that was the Moneda palace. On 9-11, in different years, different buildings were on fire in different countries. Both led to secret prisons, summary arrests, murder and disapearances. Both remain linked forever by the same politics.

I mourn for all across the world who lost something/someone on September 11 regardless of the year. I mourn for all of us.

U.S. Government: Evo same threat level as Bin Laden

5:04 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Bolivia|Controversia|Politics · 1 Comment

6 Oct 2006

According to CBS’s 60 Minutes, Bolivian president Evo Morales is as much of threat to the U.S. as Osama Bin Laden, if we are going by whose name is on the list of passengers prohibited from boarding a plane to the U.S.:

Among the 44,000 names on the list are foreign leaders like Morales, who don’t seem all that dangerous. But there are also names of people who are already in custody or in prison, like Saddam Hussein, and even dead people. Among the dead are the majority of the 19 Al Qaeda members who participated in the September 11th attacks.

However, the list doesn’t consider the names of the most dangerous terrorists, and as CBS points out, the names of the suspects who were planning a terrorist attack on British airlines this summer are not on the list.

According to Bolivian newspaper La Razón, a member of Morales’ party and parliament member is quoted as saying that the list “reflects the intellectual mediocrity that the U.S. political class has always had.”

The 60 Minutes piece about the botched “no-fly” list will air this Sunday.

Via / El Semanal Digital and La Razón

9-11-01 – Remembering the Forgetten Victims

7:30 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Events|Immigration|New York City · Comments Off

11 Sep 2006

The majority of tributes today will be paid to those firefighters, police officers, and other civil servants who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. But there were many victims who perished that day who are not remembered. Some of those unaccounted for were undocumented who died and who have not been acknowledged and whose dependents have not been in any way recognized or compensated.

Additionally many hundreds of undocumented workers were employed for the clean-up and decontamination of ground zero and surrounding community. With the recent reports of just how dangerous health conditions were in the World Trade Center area following the attacks, one has to wonder how many undocumented workers are suffering because of exposure to toxic air and debris.

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