desensitized. disgusted. damn.

(^^ my three words I felt when reading Darkroom)

so much of my young life was spent trying to shape and understand the race relations of the 20th century, specifically, the era of the Civil Rights Movement. i first recall learning about it in 2nd grade, when a room of Black children were innundated with harsh images of our not-so-distant past. while i couldn't fully comprehend why there was so much hostility towards Black folk, and while I was sickened by it, I couldn't stop taking out books from the library (picture books, especially) to excite my young mind. so many of the photographs taken held so much weight, from the colossal fire hoses thrust in our direction, to the purely evil looks on Southern whites' faces as they stood underneath lynchings. i feel from this age, i became desensitized to this racial violence, and many other forms that existed around me in my then current life. sad, but true.

which is why, when reading Darkroom, the same feelings (or, non-feelings) were present. call it a survival mechanism, call it being Black in amerikkka, etc. what did shift for me, however, was diving into the narrative experience of Lila and her family, as Argentinian folks living in Alabama in the 1960s. this created a few new wires in my brain of just who the faces are of people who lived in the South...these faces weren't just Black, white, or a biracial mix of the two. similarly, growing up in Baltimore, that racial pie chart on page 19 represented my entire life before college, as the city was 65% Black, 34% white (give or take the single digit percentile of Asian and Latino folks I knew and befriended occasionally). Lila and her family were the single digit percentile of folks who also wanted their cut of the amerikkkan pie too, and were torn at the seams of just where to belong. they proved that nothing was cut (cheap pun intended) and dry in terms of race relations, de facto or de jure jim crow laws. where did they fit? true, Argentinians are primarily comprised of European blood, but as proof from her father, who was classified as "Trigueno", they were also people of a darker hue.

it was interesting to me that she spent much of the first half of the book drawing us into not just her origins, but that of her parents, particularly her father. she traces and maps for us his bloodline WAY back to the first "wanderers" who would later become the Indigenous people of North and South America. (That, for one, is SUPER impressive -- I've been wanting to trace my family but have had little luck going the "free" route, ha.)
through a mixture of photographs and memories, she creates her own intricately drawn snapshots on pages, and lends us another lens of the Oubapo effect on the Graphic Memoir genre. unlike Mother's Urn, whose layered drawings and text flow disjointedly in and out of one another, she uses the page as a field to craft maps, some outlined sketches of folks, body parts, and anything else relevant to telling her story. in relation to other books we've read that incorporate LARGE images/photos, and the weight they hold in their stories as a sharp contrast to the multi-panel format (Alison, Laurie, and Marjane's books, for example), Lila's photos are almost 3-dimensional, and each single one jumped out at me as weighty and important. for example, the first time her baby brother sees a Black man, and refers to him as "THE DEVIL" (43), this man's stature takes up the ENTIRE page, top to bottom. it was their childhood introduction to the south, so nonetheless, truly important. (more on this "devil" thing later.)

she isn't incredibly text heavy, but the text she uses to draft her story is indeed weighted and important. it flows seamlessly with the lifelike photographs, which incorporate a mixture of cross hatching and smooth/straight line shading techniques. given what we discussed about cross hatching and such, this technique is employed in mostly chaotic times of books; here, it seems to be in one accord as her main choice. i mean, given the themes that she discusses, such as racial tension in 1960s Alabama, it would make the most sense to use it, right? still, the photos are so beautifully crafted, that even in the chaos, i couldn't help but marvel, personally. case in point, she incorporates Harry Belafonte's record on page 76 to illustrate a point of learning "the rules" of how to "act" in public; she learns from her sister that yes, she can think he's handsome, but she can't mention that he's handsome in public because of an issue of safety.

now here's the thing. i love Lila's understanding of her family moving to Alabama before "slurs against people like us hadn't entered the lexicon yet" (103). they were placed in very precarious positions as the folks who were just light enough that they could pass for white in many areas, but still preferred to be the diplomatic, just folks who respected everyone equally, Black and white. this is despite the fact that Argentina didn't have many people of African descent at all. even when Lila's father attempted to bring an all-black choir to an all-white church when he first arrived in the US, he couldn't understand why that was a problem. from the children's perspective, the naivete was present (and also absent), as she share's her baby brother's first reaction to a Black man in Alabama as "THE DEVIL" (43). i laughed OUT LOUD at this, but also wondered when she was going to address it...if at all...because it happened so early on. I also wonder how or if Lila's dad was affected by any racial wage gap, and how he didn't experience much difficulty finding work, aside from that insanely racist incident in Texas when he was assumed to be okay with not having electricity or running water for growing up an orphan. ew. (102)

likewise, Lila and her siblings' attempts at assimilation brought much more hybridity and complexity to the narrative. her sister Lissy had fuller lips, and as a result, was ridiculed by her white peers (80). Lila refused to speak Spanish "on demand", and thought of it as haunting her in public, it seemed. she knew very early on that "whiteness was a privilege", and had trouble deciding between checking "white" and "negro" boxes, despite having fair skin herself. her sister Ginny, however, was the oldest, and the boldest, and she would dive into her books and records to discover "the Black experience". it appeared to me, though, that the Quinteros did enjoy many of the privileges that white folks in the south did, as evident through sitting in the bottom floor of the movie theater (72). popcorn never held such weight for me, as Black folks would throw it down off the balcony (i think, both in subtle protest, and also because hey, movies excite us very, very deeply). her sense of horrification (new word!) at the jim crow south is indeed accurate, and humane, and fortunately, she had a father that did not want to replicate the evils of white supremacy, nor his offspring. (where's her mother in the first half, though?)

i have many, many more thoughts on this book, but i wanted to focus on the origins of Lila and her family to Alabama, and my thoughts and revelations on such. this story definitely needs to be told; the south is not black and white, but definitely a grey area; i only hope more stories are documented and told in a similar fashion.