“Everybody stand up!” Pablo shouted into the mic. We stood immediately. Since the opening batucada (a ripping, percussive substyle of samba), most of us had been fighting the urge to jump out of our seats. We just weren’t sure how to act. This wasn’t a music venue but a lecture hall in...

“Don’t leave this room saying ‘this rapper named M1 just hollered at me for a little while,’” said M1 to the crowd of students, activists, and local hip-hop heads packed into the auditorium. “You gonna miss the whole point if you sit here and look at me and consider me only a rapper. I’m...

1. Like anyone truly grounded in his or her place, Pablo (not his real name) never spoke about himself, never talked about Los Cerritos. Conversations were always about the waves that day, parties from the night before, or people—new surfers or women—who’d set up camp. He never let on to his own...

1. 1993 – The coin toss

Six months after graduating from high school, Tal Fletcher sat at the bar in the Beer Garden in Squaw Valley, California, drinking draughts of Milwaukee’s Best. The bar was below street level, windowless, and dimly lit. The in-house band, The Beer Gardeners, cranked...

3. Dec. 15, 1997 – Fly Fishing for Great Whites

Tal bounced around in the back of a van with twelve other guys all wearing black gear, camouflage, and face paint. “I looked around at the crew,” he remembered. “Jimbo was there, M.C., Miles D., Gambler, Dano, Senior, and Quinner, among...

The March

There was nothing to signal the start of the march—no drums, no speeches—just the
Madres themselves, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, their quiet footsteps on the pink bricks of the square. They carried photos: young faces, faces of the Disappeared. And their heads were covered with white...