At the Anatol Center, a crowd of students shyly munched on snacks from Trader Joe’s — dark chocolate covered pretzels, lime spritzer and white cheddar cheese puffs — while queer-identified writer and teacher Myriam Gurba read excerpts from her nonfiction book about sexual assault, rape and murder.
These excerpts from Gurba’s latest book, “Mean,” reveal the synthesis of her experience as a survivor of rape — her story being irrevocably connected to the life and death of a Santa Maria based woman, Sophia Castro Torres, by at least one simple fact: both crimes were committed by the same man.
The event was organized by several groups on campus including La Raza Student Association, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Student Association and the Spanish Graduate Student Association.
Students of gender, race, literature and language studies gathered for the reading on Monday night. Gurba, a Long Beach local, has performed with the queer spoken word group Sister Spit, and is a contributor for KCET.
Gurba opened the reading with a column of hers recently published for The Paris Review.
Tasked with an open-ended prompt — a first person narrative about experiences with theft — she produced “The Mexican-American Bandit.” This piece invites the reader into her family’s world of stuffing purses with extra meat at buffets and ripping spines off library book covers to sneak them past magnet detectors at the door.
She justifies her library book theft by saying, “When I went on my first stealing spree, I became a Mexican bandit, and a practitioner of Manifest Destiny.”
Her story historicizes theft by contextualizing California as stolen land, referencing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ceded Mexican territory to the United States. This in turn scrutinizes how theft has been historically justified by Manifest Destiny. The piece also set the tone for the remainder of the reading by introducing the ways race and racialization are deeply embedded in everyday life; the good, bad and violent aspects.
Gurba describes her book as a memoir with novelistic tropes and true crime elements. The excerpts read were characterized by a mixture of journalistic fact and insightful testimony. “Mean,” Gurba offers, is a book that attempts to make meaning of her own survival, and of the rape and murder of Sophia Torres — of her death and her vulnerability as a homeless immigrant woman.
Later during the discussion facilitated by WGSS professor Stacy Macias, Gurba elaborated on the title’s double meaning, explaining how “mean” or “meanness” may be used as a defense mechanism for queer people and survivors.
In fact, this tongue-in-cheek kind of wit is present in her vignettes as she boldly expresses, “God is like rape,” and “Is that a rapist in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” These sayings, within the personal section of the book titled “Omnipresence,” shed light on how acutely rape is felt and experienced by survivors in what she deems “The color of rape.”
Jamilet Ochoa, fourth year english education major and membership officer for La Raza, described the reading as crucial to discussions of sexual assault.
“[The reading] was raw, personal and breathtaking,” Ochoa said. “Gurba’s reading from her book allowed me to let the ugliness and darkness of sexual assault sink deep into my heart.”
The tone quickly evolved from cheeky to eerie and mournful as Gurba read from the first chapter of the book titled, “Wisdom,” in which she used legal documents to create a fictionalized version of Sophia Torres’ final moments. Gurba gives life to the legal and emotionless criminal documents — and does so without sparing the gory details of sexual violence. The rape scene is an impactful, unsettling moment, and Gurba takes this opportunity to discuss the relationship between wreckage, possession and arousal that informs our understandings of rape.
The brilliance of her work shines through in her invocation of Aztec sacrifice when she describes the scene of the crime. The baseball field where the crime was committed is reimagined as a place of horrific sacrifice, bloodstained bleachers like ancient stone steps where sanguine offerings were spilled.
After the brief discussion, a handful of students raced to purchase one of only three copies of “Mean” that Gurba brought with her. For those who still want to cop their own, the book was released Tuesday and is now widely available in digital and print editions.