Now I’m dancing, and I’m dancing too much,I’m dancing like a maniac.” These songs of mine are about the dance: the steps, the rituals. I want to dance for love. I want to dance for war. I want to dance for power. I want to dance for survival.I want to dance for the end of time. I wrote the songs in a dance studio in the mountains above Sacramento. My roommates and I watched our pennies, counting them out in one-dollar bills and fives, paying for our lessons in dimes, in quarters, in a handful of bills no bigger than the first ones we carried with us. I’d worked in the fields and picked vegetables in the cannery, and then my brother got sick and I quit my job in the cannery. He got sick and died, and I didn’t have a job. My mother moved into a small apartment with me. On a Tuesday afternoon, my mother picked me up from school and we came home to our little yellow house, and my mother turned on the oven and cooked cabbage soup with bacon for supper. The only meat we had, the only meat we ever had, was bacon. Cabbage soup with bacon. My mother boiled cabbage, carrots, and potatoes, then she steamed it all with sliced-thin-and-baked bacon. A little later we had cabbage-soup-with-bacon. Our apartment was upstairs from a coffeehouse on a road that led through a park, past a lake and a stream to a dam and a mountain lake. We came back to the studio in the morning, late in the day after the nights out, to drink coffee with people who liked to dance. People who worked at the university, people who owned businesses in the city. People who wanted to have a great job and love and children and a place to live in California. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” a man would ask me. I’d smile and shrug, and the man would tell me it’s time for us to go home. The last song was about dancing all night long. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” the girl in the red shorts said. “I think you’re great,” I said. I wanted to dance with her. I could dance with her for life. We could go back to the little yellow house in the mountains. The dancer sat on the porch, where it was sunny and warm. She was a redhead, a few inches taller than me, with a great backside and shapely legs. She sat on the low banister, looking out at the sun with her big-cat eyes. I walked to the edge of the porch. I took off my coat and I folded it carefully, and I laid it across the step. I took off my hat and my gloves, and I unbuttoned my coat. “You want to dance?” I asked. I walked up the three steps to the porch. She leaned against the wall, watching me. “Okay,” I said, and I sat down beside her. “I think we dance good together,” she said. We started dancing. We were in our twenties. She was with friends, a few more people who were dancing. We danced slow and then we danced fast. We danced to swing. We danced to the blues, to ragtime, to rock and roll. The people looked on. “I’m dancing too much,” I said. “I can’t stop.” I went inside with my coat and my hat and my gloves, but I didn’t go home. The girl was waiting for me, and we danced. “I want to dance for love,” she said. “I want to dance for war. I want to dance for power. I want to dance for survival. I want to dance for the end of time. I want to make a dance in this place. I want to dance all night long.” The last song was about dancing all night long. Jennifer M. Barker is the author of more than a dozen books, including the short story collection The Great Cake Mystery and the novella The Cure for Death by Lightning (Fiction River). A version of “The Dance Is the Word” was adapted for the stage and appears in the Talking Book Theatre at the Huntington Theatre Company. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications. She has a PhD in theater and performance studies from UC Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley. For this second episode of our month of oral history videos, we're back with María de los Angeles Martínez, Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a specialist in gender, race, and violence and has published five books on the subject, including Clandestinos, a major study of the immigrant farmworker in California and New York. María shares her experiences growing up in Mexico, attending college in Washington, DC and living in Mexico City and Chicago. She talks about her early experiences fighting discrimination as a Mexican-American and explores how her activism changed her life. María shares powerful personal stories of the racism she experienced as a girl in Mexico and the racism and violence she experienced as a woman in the US. She also shares how she dealt with the threats and insults of her attackers. She discusses what it was like to go to college in the US and how she fought racism on campus. This audio also contains an update on our original program “The War Before” that María filmed with her colleague Núria Marqués. [Transcription in progress, we will update this page as soon as a transcript is available.] Audio transcription via www.aorae.org For more information about the Center for Latin American Studies, please visit their website. Allie X’s new album “All Hail” was released March 17th, 2015. The album is available for pre-order now on iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay and wherever digital music is sold. An accompanying album art book is available for pre-order now on Amazon, and a limited-edition tour edition of the album will be available on Amazon in the coming weeks. Please visit alliexofficial.com for more information. Jennifer M. Barker is the author of more than a dozen books, including the short story collection The Great Cake Mystery and the novella The Cure for Death by Lightning (Fiction River). A version of “The Dance Is the Word” was adapted for the stage and appears in the Talking Book Theatre at the Huntington Theatre Company. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications. She has a PhD in theater and performance studies from UC Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley. Over the course of more than 20 years as an investigator and prosecutor, I’ve seen just about every form of crime possible. I’ve also seen the work of my colleagues in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office over the years, doing everything from running our Major Crimes Bureau to prosecuting crimes against children to supervising the prosecution of murder and sex crimes. I’ve seen good prosecutors making mistakes and doing their best to help victims and victims’ families during the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault. And I’ve also seen really bad mistakes made—and worse, not seen. For example, a few years back, a man died after his penis was amputated in a Los Angeles County Jail, leaving his family and loved ones with a terrible nightmare of who the man was and what his life had been. As prosecutors, we knew this tragic outcome was avoidable, because a law enforcement officer did something that was both illegal and wrong. We knew that, with the right guidance and training, the same bad outcome could have been prevented—if we had been able to look up the rules and guidelines for medical care in Los Angeles County jails. Prosecutors and jail administrators have to know how to apply the law to the facts and keep our prisons safe for their inmates and staff. We can’t be doing a good job of prosecuting crimes if we don’t have the time or resources to learn the basic law, training and policies that pertain to prosecutors’ work in the field. It is critical that prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies and police officers know the basics of how the legal system works, and not be thrown into the case and made to make decisions on the fly, especially since it may take years for someone’s case to make it to court. Law enforcement officers have to know all the laws on how to keep our prisoners safe, and prosecutors need to understand how medical mistakes can impact the outcome in a criminal case. When prosecutors know how to properly conduct investigations and write reports, they can help victims and their families tell their story. Knowing about the importance of good crime scene investigations and victim reports will give prosecutors the ability to tell if medical care has gone awry in a crime that is being investigated. It will give prosecutors a basic knowledge of how injuries, trauma, and the way the human body operates can have an impact on medical examiners and their ability to accurately determine the cause of death. Knowing this can help prosecutors and investigators come up with a better hypothesis about what may have happened, and helps them conduct a thorough investigation and better direct the investigative process