“Writing is not just a way of communicating for me but an art in where I can never be wrong and where I can always find comfort in being vulnerable to unwind my mind and get lost in the strokes of my pen, writing whatever my soul desires.”
These words, composed by UCI graduate Martha Trujillo, are part of the artist’s statement I asked her to write for her submission to this issue—a stack of six journals she composed between the years 2007-2012 while she was in middle and high school. Over the course of the summer, I read, transcribed, and edited these journals and I got to know Martha as a 13-year old, a 15-year old, and an 18-year old fresh out of high school.
A recent graduate from UCI with her Master’s in Criminology, Law, and Society, Martha now works at Orangewood Foundation, a safe harbor for foster youth and youth from the community who have experienced trafficking and homelessness. When I returned Martha’s journals, she took me on a tour of Orangewood. She introduced me to people she has known for decades, some of them at Orangewood when Martha was there as a young teenager herself. Her eyes lit up when she talked about her work and her hopes for the future. I thought about all of the passion and compassion in Martha’s journals for herself and others and how humbled and honored I felt that she entrusted me with these precious expressions of vulnerability that were originally intended for her eyes only.
When Martha and I started this project together and before I started the work of transcribing, I asked her who she was publishing all of this for. “For people like me,” she said, “so they can see that they aren’t alone and hopefully be inspired.” While transcribing this work, I tried to remember that audience and showcase the parts of Martha’s life where she expresses the will to create meaning and experience joy. Such expressions can’t come easy for a teenager forced to worry about whether they will survive childhood.
“This is the bravest thing I’ve ever done,” Martha said.
Thinking back to all of the private thoughts and feelings I’ve poured into the pages of my own diaries over the years, I can’t imagine.
There is incredible power in the diary writing of any teenage girl, especially one writing in the midst of great trauma—we know this or we wouldn’t assign the Diary of Anne Frank to high school students year after year. You can read about Martha’s own high school experience reading and identifying with Anne Frank’s diary, but you can also read about the historical moment in which Martha herself comes of age–a time when mainstream public discourse around police violence was just blowing up. In 2011, Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill man with schizophrenia living on the streets of his own home town, Fullerton–where Martha is also from–was brutally beaten to death by six Fullerton police officers. I had read about Thomas in the news many times, but when Martha writes about it, she remembers her friend Jesse; she writes Thomas and Jesse a letter; she pulls everything she has from her powers of expression; she grieves for the world; and she makes the promise that only a young person full of confusion and passion and the desperate faith required to act can make:
Jesse, Kelly you guys are victims of the system of the media of all these judgmental people society is fucked up. I’m against it. I will avenge the deaths of both of you and to all the people that have died from the piece of shit system that supposedly helps us I’m going to get help. I can’t do it all on my own. Us kids are the future. And we can rise higher than all this. But I won’t forget my goal because I have only one I want out of this and that’s “a world treated to its natural fundamentals no artificial gestures or pleasures a true imaginative tangible world with the laws of reality to our humanity. Love and peace to all that can dream and achieve. Remembering still who we are and where it is that we came from without judging the people even after you meet them. The logics of a free life free of drugs free of violence and evil a world where you can walk naked and feel no shame in it. To know you won’t go hungry if you share. To be able to cry out for help and be heard. To be lost and be found to be unprotected then be attended to be able to be living in your own shadow if it’s the desire yet still be noticed.
The impulse of a school-aged teenager to write to and for herself alone—as coping strategy, as documentation, and as art—is itself an act of resistance against the harmful dominant narratives that would speak (and thus act) on her behalf. I take great comfort in knowing that such writing is as alive and well today as it was when Anne Frank wrote in 1942—writing that can teach all of us how to be brave and alive in the face of anything.
This whole issue is dedicated to Martha and to all students impacted by the carceral system who are using education to make “a true imaginative tangible world with the laws of reality to our humanity.” We would like to thank all of the Underground Scholars who worked with us on this issue, all of the youths at the Orange County Juvenile Facility and to the incarcerated UCI students in Lifted who contributed their writing and art.
May we continue to envision a future where education is emancipated from the conventions that place limits on student expression. The art and writing you will find here is from people who believe that such a future begins with them.
Sincerely,
Rachael Collins
Editor-In-Chief
