Cecily McMillan - The Emancipation of Cecily McMillan: An American Memoir

Copyright 2016 by Cecily McMillan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McMillan, Cecily, 1988- author.

Title: The emancipation of Cecily McMillan : an American memoir / Cecily McMillan.

Description: New York : Nation Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000493 (print) | LCCN 2016001136 (ebook) | ISBN 9781568585390 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: McMillan, Cecily, 1988- | RadicalsUnited StatesBiography. | Generation YUnited StatesAttitudes. | Occupy movementUnited States. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

Classification: LCC HN90.R3 M38 2016 (print) | LCC HN90.R3 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4092--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000493

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Contents

Photographs follow

Table of Contents

by Pussy Riots Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina

O n May 9, 2014, we met with the brilliant American activist Cecily McMillan in the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island. She has amazing political charisma, a trait not every social or political activist can successfully cultivate. Cecilys efforts are aimed at challenging social indifference, a hurdle she personally fell victim to on May 5 of that year in a district court in Manhattan. Cecily idealizes volunteering, solidarity, and mutual consideration of other peoples struggles, but her ideals were nowhere to be found in that court. When Cecily was condemned, she was taken hostage by the court, a court that represents the city she called home, the city where Occupy Wall Street was born.

The day after Cecily was found guilty, nine of the twelve jurors wrote a letter to the judge expressing their horror at Cecilys sentence and requesting an alternative punishment. The jurors had not understood the article used to accuse Cecily, nor were they aware that the article stipulated imprisonment. The jurys change of heart calls to mind a quote from Luke 23:34: They know not what they do. Cecilys conviction is the perfect example of why her efforts as an activist are neededthe inability of the jury to accept Cecilys problems as their own, to take the time and consideration during her trial to seek justice, resulted in her imprisonment.

Cecily told us with great pride that her ability to talk to people of different backgrounds and groups is one of her most valued traits. Her ultimate goal is to find ways to bring together disparate social groups and create a platform for shared, collective action. At various points in her life, Cecily has found herself in completely different strata of American society, switching from one layer of language and experience to another. This is the heart of Cecilys aimto master these other tongues, to understand the social circles outside of the ones into which she was born, raised, and made her career, and to understand other peoples experiences. We saw her do this with her fellow prisoners in Rikers, and we see her do this as a prison reform activist now. Cecily wants to gradually recover the lost dialogue between the 1 percent who own everything and the 99 percent who have to live in the shadows. While those in power want to silence undesirable voices, it is Cecilys goal to return those voices to the people who have been deprived of them.

Cecily McMillans case and her work today reflect a global struggle. The courts verdict and imprisonment of this young woman marks a dangerous new direction in the United States, one that has repercussions in those countries that are indirectly impacted by US domestic policies. These countries include Russia, where the government is introducing conservative laws and suppressing the political activity of its citizens. More and more often, Vladimir Putin and his team are citing the practices of other countries, including the more recent and unsavory efforts to suppress dissent in the United States, to justify their actions.

But Cecily, like activists all over the world, has not given up. More than ever, she is doing the work of a true patriot.

M y mother always said we were perfect for each other; she never wanted to be a parent and I never wanted to be a child. Her water broke on a Friday, but she didnt notice because it didnt gush like in the movies. The following Tuesday, she was hospitalized for an infection and found out she was in labor; I was overcooked and her body was trying to get rid of me. And so it was that I was rejected into this world at 12:42 p.m. on September 20, 1988very late and very sick. Before I was removed to intensive care, the nurse let my mother hold me for a minute. I was hairy all over and covered with rashes; she turned to my father and said, Oof! Shes kind of homely, isnt she? She was only twenty-one, and he was a young twenty-sevenneither knew anything about babies or ever intended to be parents. When the hospital handed me over a week later, my mother said, I cant believe theyre letting her go home with us.

Us was James Emerson McMillan and Maria Celina Mutrux-Barrera. Dad, a mans man, is six-foot-four with a sturdy structure and supersized features undermined by bright blue eyes that give away his sensitive interior. Mom, in turn, stands four-eleven, short with delicate featuresfair skin, dainty nose, high cheekbonesand watchful brown eyes that hint at the turbulence beneath her calm, cool surface. Hes a red-blooded, red-headed (you guessed it!) Irish Amurican from southeast Texas. Shes a blue-blooded, dark-featured (yes, documented) immigrant from across that ever-so-messy southern border of the United States. The two are opposites in almost every way and, so, it took a pretty odd set of events to throw them together. More than anything, thoughlike everything then and, really, sincetheir fates were intertwined with oil.

Mom was born in 1967, to an affluent family of doctors and businessmen, learned ladies and prima ballerinas. She and her two brothers grew up in Mexico City attended to by a household staff and educated by nuns at a private Catholic school. This lifestyle was afforded by a combination of her mothers inherited wealth and her fathers lucrative oil investmentsthat is, until the 1982 Mexican Crisis changed everything. It was the biggest recession since the 1930s: oil prices tanked and dragged the value of peso down with them. Her fathers business went bankrupt, and her mothers savings werent worth anything anymore. Trying to salvage a future for their children, her mother traded in the remains of the family estate for a small house in Brownsville, Texas, while her father traveled for months on end, chasing an endless stream of get-rich schemes. He never did reclaim his fortune, though, and, one day, he just never came home. A proud, devout woman, scorned and ashamed, Abuela was left alone to raise three kids, forced to sell her jewelry to feed themand, later, Mary Kay makeup. Along the way, she became riddled with depression and hardened by resentment, but the kids, as they always do, paid the highest price: Samuel, the oldest, got married and had a kid at the age of eighteen; William, the youngest, got into drugs and committed suicide at the age of seventeen; while Mom, in the middle, got outran away, couch-surfed to Austin at the age of sixteen. By eighteen, though, shed gotten herself into college and was taking classes at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.