​​My father wasn’t like other men in the Excelsior District. He did my sister Elena’s hair, made sure Mami ate first, and wore pink polos to mass. He smelled like chili powder, cinnamon, and Pepsi—he was the only man I knew who liked Pepsi more than Coke. He came to all my clarinet recitals and didn’t get angry when I confessed that I hated soccer, even if he did buy me Mexico jerseys for the next three birthdays. He always found some odd job to do, learning to pave roads and fix cars and paint houses on the fly with more skill than regular workers. With that and Mami’s nannying gigs, we landed an apartment of our own despite not having papers. San Francisco was less hostile back then.

​

Most importantly, my father could dance. Not just the ass grinding some people call dancing, but real dance, everything from hip-hop to tango to folklórico. He tried to teach me, but I wasn’t gifted with coordination. I practiced all the time anyway, two-stepping behind the cafeteria during recess, trying to get my lanky limbs to obey me. My father delighted in every little improvement I made and told me one day I would be better than him. I knew I wouldn’t, but I think he meant it. My father excelled in style and precision—he had the fastest footwork in the whole neighborhood and won every block party dance-off—but what set him apart was joy: this furious elation I could never replicate. He smiled all the time, with that huge, dimpled grin, but he only ever laughed when he danced. His laugh was one of those rich, belly laughs that extends from somewhere deep inside the body and bubbles all the way to the surface. Dancing, my father said, was the only time he felt in control of his body.

​

My father wasn’t like other men, except for one thing, one small, shitty habit: he went to Club Umbría. He went because he loved to dance—but I knew he wasn’t just dancing, because he smelled like tequila and cologne when he came home. He only went on Fridays, when he said he needed ‘man time’. It was only then that he and Mami ever fought, yelling about bills and family values and being un mal ejemplo for the little boy. It was only those nights that Mami cried—she didn’t even cry at the funeral—but that didn’t happen every week. Sometimes he would return and kiss Mami’s shoulders as she pushed him gently into bed, laughing. Other nights, when Mami gave up on him and fell asleep, he would pass out on the sofa, alone. On Saturday mornings, I would creep out to the living room and place my little hand on his thick black brow, and he would wake up smiling. He was always there on those golden Saturday mornings—him and his dimpled grin—until one morning he wasn’t and Mami called the police for the first time. They didn’t do anything, other than talk about hospital bills and make her sign a ton of papers, and she regretted giving them her name. That was the day I stopped dancing.

​

There was a story that rotated through our community about a young man named Alex Nieto who was killed by the police. It happened when I was eight, two years before the funeral. A white tech worker saw Nieto eating tacos alone in a park, thought his taser was a gun, and called the cops. They shot him without hesitation. I think there’s still a mural of him in my old neighborhood, behind where they built the Whole Foods. He’s wearing a Niners bomber jacket and holding a taco in his left hand, with a wide grin on his face. They were planning on painting him in the red hoodie he wore that day, but his mother asked them not to, saying she should have told him not to wear it. Mami used to change the subject whenever his story came up, but after that summer morning she listened to the whole thing through, every time. 

​

Mami, Elena, and I moved in with my best friend Jaimé after the funeral. They owned a taquería with a two-bedroom flat on the second floor and an in-law unit in the basement. Mami must have been desperate or she wouldn’t have let Jaimé’s gigantic family stuff themselves in the flat so we could have the in-law. They were already housing several stray cousins and a crippled uncle, none of whom paid rent. Jaimé’s mom saw Mami’s bashful smiles and asked her to nanny her littlest children, two three-year old twins with awful tempers. For eight hours a day, Monday through Saturday, Mami, the twins, and three white toddlers traipsed around the neighborhood, upending libraries and parks and grocery stores with giggles and screams. The only time Mami looked peaceful was when she told the children stories, with all five of them swaddled in her big, black skirt. By the time the little ones went home, all Mami’s smiles and stories were used up, and Elena and I pretended not to care. Every week Jaimé’s mom tried to pay Mami and every week Mami refused. Once Jaimé’s mom hid a giftcard in Mami’s purse, but Mami found her out and returned it inside a homemade cake. Mami was clever that way: she paid whatever rent she could through the taquería tip jar, separating it into little daily installments. Jaimé’s family never said anything, but they delivered us free meals three times a week. 

​

The taquería sat directly across the street from Club Umbría. This was the heart of the old Excelsior District, where hundreds of solemn-faced brown people poured their lives into stuffy hole-in-the-wall restaurants, trying to carve out their place in that cruel city with pupusas, wontons, and lumpia. Our little basement room had no windows, so at least we didn’t have to look at the club, even if it was impossible to block out the blaring bachata songs, barfights, and occasional gunshots. I hated that music. It mocked us, masking the shittiness of that place with the face of celebration. 

​

It was the police who shut the club down, four years too late, and plastered it with caution tape and keep out signs. I don’t know what finally did it— a drunken fight, a harassment case, a drug exchange. Another death. The building was left to rot, windowless and water-stained, half-covered in fading teal paint and that crude female silhouette flaking off its doors. With the club gone, the drunkards moved to the corner store bus stop. There were even more fights after that—the deadly kind, with shrieking and crunching, knives and gunshots. The drunkards were all middle-aged men and more of them appeared every day, slouching against street signs with liquor bottles in paper bags, heckling teenage girls and rambling about all the money they used to make before the city went to shit. The new men came from the district to the north, pushed out by steep rent, gluten-free bread stores, and a public who called the police on people in oversized hoodies. They were forced into their relatives’ basements in the Excelsior, two or three families to a room. These new men were much more hopeless than the old ones, and much, much louder. But they rarely ever played music, and they never danced.

​

A few months later, the club was sold to some wealthy hipster with a vision for a large-scale restoration project. He thought he was doing a good deed for our neighborhood, replacing sticky floors and the stink of piss with redwood tables and local IPAs. 

​

I distinctly remember the day it was finished. It was my father’s birthday, and Jaimé convinced me to skip our last three classes at the high school. We returned home to find that Club Umbría was no more, replaced by the magnificent Ether Brewing Company. The new business was complete with a sign reading ‘community-owned, local and sustainable ingredients’. Its walls were black—a velvety, matte hue that reflected no light—and its large, wooden double doors were bright red, the color of blood. Its windows gleamed in the sun, scrubbed to perfection with glinting silver windowpanes. Beside the crimson doors, the windows looked like wide, white eyes above a large, gaping maw, like a sleek, goth monster. We would grow resigned to these changes, but this first one was horrifying. The Club’s decay didn’t bother us because it felt honest, the way a cemetery is honest. That day it was erased, painted over with one flick of a broad, white brush, and replaced with this gleaming abomination called Ether. 

​

Jaimé thought we should spray-paint something real big over it, a giant slogan like ‘Fuck the police’. I told him I just wanted a Pepsi. He ignored me, chanting, ‘fuck that shit, 'cause I ain't the one’ as he crip-walked into the taquería. 

​

I remember wondering where the ghosts of the Club Umbría went. They certainly weren’t welcome in Ether. 

​

We skipped school because Jaimé’s cousin told us there was going to be a car show, right here in front of the taquería. I never understood why my friends were so infatuated with cars; it was hard enough to meet basic needs, much less get a fancy whip. But they dragged me to the shows anyway, obsessing over those gleaming vehicles purchased with credit card debt, with their perfect paint jobs and custom subwoofers. Jaimé promised this car show would be different, saying his cousins were bringing ‘something special to the hood’. I didn’t believe him.

​

Other kids from our school were there too, arriving in groups of ten and fifteen on the 29 until about two hundred of us were crammed onto the sidewalk in front of Ether. We told the school we were going to the march downtown (the rich kids from the other high schools were protesting climate change that day) and our sweet, white, liberal teachers happily let us go. They were probably proud of us. We were the new generation then—everyone put so much hope in ‘the young people’, with their far-left internet crazes and affinity for democratic socialism. We were never like those kids; we knew better than to put our hope in politics and never really believed we could change the world, no matter how much we proclaimed we would. Our teachers thought we meant it—I guess they believed in us—but they never really knew what our lives were like in that cruel, tumultuous city that didn’t give two shits about us, that city we loved so much.

​

The kids were all decked out in hood regalia—chains and watches and Jordans and jerseys. I dapped up my friends (that was the only kind of hand-eye coordination I was okay at) and tried to stop thinking about my father. Everyone else was expecting something; their voices were fluttery, bubbling with some hidden knowledge I wasn’t in on, like the masses before a revolution. During a lull in traffic, the crowd flooded the street, filling it from end to end with one huge cheer. I was pushed up against some buff Samoan dude who was damp with sweat, and for a moment I was next to Jaimé, who yelled something I couldn’t hear before I was pulled away, crushed between two skinny Chinese twins in snapbacks. Everyone was shrieking and laughing and whooping; everyone but me.

​

Then the cars came. 

​

Glinting in the late winter sun, they moved slow and smooth into the crowd like parade floats, blasting hip-hop anthems. The drivers hung out of the windows, slapping hands and bouncing to the beat. The crowd pulled back into a giant circle around the cars, filling up the surrounding crosswalks to give them the full breadth of the intersection. The traffic we blocked honked and cussed, but the crowd just laughed, throwing their fists in the air, middle fingers up. The first car took its place in the center—a sleek black sedan with bright red wheels—and for one moment, all was still. Then the engine revved, the wheels spun, and the car swung around in a flawless doughnut, again and again and again in perfect circles, its paint glinting, speakers pounding, wheels screeching, burning its presence into the sidewalk with thick, black lines. A girl with a red bandana over her mouth leaned out the window, her thick, dark hair streaking in the wind and threw her right fist in the air. The crowd roared, erupting in song and dance, filling their street with the sound of their voices and the movement of their bodies—the stoplight was their spotlight, the faded pavement was their stage—and they chanted and they stomped and they whirled, turbulent and coherent, chaotically unified, loud, colorful, bold, in a collective high, a furious euphoria of vibrations. This was a true high, not a drug high; it electrified their blood and they burst with celebration, with the declaration that their bodies were theirs.  

​

They swirled around me, jostling me left and right, but I was limp. Silent. The rhythm of joy pounded in the body of the Filipina girl next to me, in the sedan’s engine, in Jaimé’s elated screams, in every being, every body but mine. I yearned to feel the vibration, to be with that girl in the red bandana, to join the cars in their jubilee—but all I could think about was Club Umbría.

​

I caught sight of the cops. The crowd’s movements kept them on the outside, and they tried to push through, yelling with patchy red faces and hoarse voices—but their noise was silenced by the sounds of YG and Mustard, by the screeching of burning rubber, by the laughter of the crowd. They yelled and yelled and with each yell, they were more silent, flopping helplessly against the wall of celebration. 

​

It was then that I saw—saw the glory of the people around me, saw the power in their voices and the strength in their dance, the joy in their bodies. I knew it would soon end, just as I knew the Club was just one of many deaths, but in this moment we were in control of our street, our city, our bodies—and everything was upside down and backwards and everything was just as it should be. The rhythm entered my body; it pounded through my blood, it bubbled in my chest, it pulsed behind my eyes, and my body began to move: bouncing, stomping, shrieking, and laughing, laughing from that deep place below the belly, laughing with furious joy, that mirth that comes when you perceive the hilarity of the world—the rich and their alehouses, the police and their guns, the streets and their machismo, the drunkards and their dancing, and me too—me especially. Me and my people who knew better than all that, who knew better but suffered worse. 

​

And I saw them there, the ghosts of Club Umbría. I saw them and they were dancing.

​

Written in 2021.