Our First Felon President
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And Mexico’s first woman leader   June 3, 2024 Hello and wow, Where were you when a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the so-called Stormy Daniels hush-money case? I was relaxing on my couch, thinking about the Disaster Girl meme. Sentencing will occur July 11—four days before the Republican National Convention. Each count carries a penalty of up to four years in prison, though the presiding judge, Justice Juan M. Merchan, may instead choose to sentence Trump to probation, fines, or house arrest. In any case, Trump’s inevitable appeal is unlikely to be wrapped up before the 2024 election, but he’ll always be known as the U.S. president who became a convicted felon over using campaign funds to suppress a National Enquirer story to influence the 2016 election. We got the reality-show president we wanted, I guess! While we let all this sink in, today’s newsletter focuses on another consequential election—the one in Mexico, where citizens are likely to elect its first woman president. Plus, the hypocrisy of a Supreme Court Justice basically going “mah wife,” a really great song to get you through the hard times, and some of our favorite reads by AAPI authors for the final weekend reading list of AAPI Heritage month. Orange is his color, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd  WHAT’S GOING ONAn election referendum on femicide: This Saturday, Mexicans will head to the polls to elect a new president, with two women at the forefront: progressive former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and her opponent, currently behind her in the polls, conservative candidate Xóchitl Gálvan. Sheinbaum is considered the protegée of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and is part of the Morena party, which elevated him to power; she has run, in part, on uplifting citizens from poverty and increasing security through social welfare. And, in addition to the seemingly Sisyphean task of curbing cartel violence and combating widespread corruption, whoever is elected must address the epidemic of femicide in Mexico, where ten women on average are murdered every day by intimate partners or other family members. Despite their historic roles as women candidates in a country entrenched in machista culture, both Sheinbaum and Gálvan’s statements on combating femicide have been vague, and some Mexican feminists are concerned about their ability to make a substantive difference. One skeptical activist recently told Ms. that she sees Sheinbaum as disinterested in “working on a comprehensive solution to femicide or bringing justice to the families of victims. We don’t expect a profound change or any real progress on the cases.” Furthering fears are both women candidates’ fuzzy proposals on other important topics like abortion and LGBQTIA rights. In an excellent new report by The World, feminist lawyer Patricia Olamendi offered one solution: “Mexico has a unique opportunity for change with a female president. The most urgent issue to tackle by the next administration is the creation of a prosecutor’s office specializing in femicides to deliver justice.” Until the next president accomplishes at least that, the valiant feministas of Mexico will continue pushing for change in the streets. As one feminist from the radical Black Bloc told AFP, “If we have to burn everything, we burn everything.”  CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM STUMPING, GESTURING IN CDMX (VIA HECTOR VIVAS/GETTY IMAGES) AND:• Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has finally addressed the upside-down flag hanging outside his house on January 6, first trying to blame it on a neighborly beef which actually happened a month after the flag was up, then just shunting all the blame onto his wife, Martha-Ann Alito. “She makes her own decisions,” he said in a letter to Congress, “and I have always respected her right to do so.” Oh really?, a coven of women around the country whispered in witchy unison. • Rolling Stone’s Cheyenne Roundtree and Nancy Dillon have published a blockbuster investigation into Diddy’s history of physical and sexual abuse allegations, which reportedly dates at least back to his time as a student at Howard University in the late 1980s. With some truly awful details, the report gives us yet another chilling look at how an entire industry can know about one powerful man’s allegedly abusive behavior for more than 30 years. As one source said of witnessing Diddy verbally abuse Cassie in public, “Why is nobody saying anything? Are they that scared of him?” • In April, a talented singer from Toronto named Jennarie shared some of “Never Been Small,” a song she wrote in response to fat-shaming and other abuse she’s experienced online. The message (and her gorgeous voice) went viral; today, the full song is available and I can’t stop listening to her tale of survival and self-acceptance. This is the kind of track you blast when you’re at your lowest to give yourself the energy to pull through. Her other music is also amazing! • Fortune reports that Hello Alice, a company that helps small business growth, has prevailed against a lawsuit over a grant it had been offering with Progressive to Black-owned commercial transportation businesses. The suit, brought by racist lizard Stephen Miller’s legal firm on behalf of a white male trucker alleging discrimination, was thrown out by an Ohio judge, who determined the trucker was unable to prove injury—which, like, yeah. • Speaking of posi vibes… The Moana 2 trailer dropped. Auliʻi Cravalho reprises her role as the title character, who this time around embarks on a very cool-looking journey to Oceania in order to “reconnect our people across the entire ocean.” Disney intra-Pacific Islands decolonization narrative? We’ll see (it’s out in November), but writer/director David Derrick Jr., whose family is Samoan, apparently got his grandfather’s tapa cloth in the scenery! • And on that note of family fashion: If you saw the beautiful Michael and Hushi keffiyeh dress Bella Hadid wore at Cannes, don’t miss the Palestinian-American supermodel’s brief explainer about the history of the pattern, and what the fishnet, olive leaves, and sea waves mean to Palestinian history and resilience.  WEEKEND READING 📚For AAPI Heritage month, three of our editors share their summer reading recommendations. Living For Change: An Autobiography by Grace Lee Boggs An activist for all of her prolific, world-changing 100 years (she wrote her final book, The Next American Revolution, at age 95), of course you’d want to know how the legendary Grace Lee Boggs conducted her beautiful, politically engaged life. In Living For Change, she chronicles it all: her birth in 1915 above her father’s Chinese American restaurant in Providence, her union with her beloved husband (fellow activist Jimmy Boggs), her work in the civil rights and labor movements in 1960s Detroit, publishing the leftist labor journal Correspondence. If you need some inspiration to get out there and Do Something, this is pretty great at lighting a fire. – Julianne Escobedo Shepherd The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang There is a certain je ne sais quoi that I feel brings together a lot of Otherized groups living in America, and it goes beyond race and ethnicity. The Loneliest Americans, which explores both Caspian’s personal history and the larger story of Asians in the U.S., spoke to my own struggles with identity—specifically the ways in which people of color are taught the value of mimicking whiteness while also being asked to carry on cultural traditions. It’s an uncomfortable dance between two lives, two versions of yourself, neither of which seem to fit quite right, and Caspian adeptly describes what it’s like to exist in the middle of that. – Shannon Melero They Called Us Exceptional by Prachi Gupta I must disclose my bias—I worked with Prachi for years and consider her a friend—but this moving memoir, written in the format of letters to her mother, is so much more than the recollections of a life. Through her struggles against violent patriarchal culture, she bucks against the model minority myth and makes cogent, heartfelt demands towards liberation—of her mother, of South Asian American women. Along the way, she finds her own self-acceptance. It’s harrowing. It’s beautiful. It will make you cry. – Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Stay True by Hua Hsu This won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, and it is one of my favorite books. I read it shortly after I lost a dear friend, who was South Asian, to an unexpected death. What I saw in this book was profound grief and how it interweaves with our identities. It read to me as much as an Asian American coming-of-age story as it was a love letter to a childhood friend and the time the author knew him. It forced me to sit with the nostalgia of good times and the joy and agony of that remembering. – Samhita Mukhopadhyay Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan I became a Kevin Kwan stan after the first few pages of Crazy Rich Asians, and with this latest story of wealth, high drama, love, and status, he proves that he simply does not miss. Kwan once again weaves together a tale with such vivid description, I feel like I’m in the room with his characters—although, since I don’t have the correct pedigree, they’d wonder why I was in the room at all. The sensation I get from Kwan’s work is very similar (I imagine) to what people in the 1800s must have felt reading Jane Austen for the first time. It reveals the inner workings of a world we don’t truly know while still giving some sense of familiarity through the universal trials of love and familial expectation. – Shannon Melero BONUS: The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy Though Roy is not Asian American, her book The End of Imagination illustrates the profound impact of the actions of the U.S. on countries across Eastern and Western Asia, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and India. After Roy’s speech last year about the demise of democracy in India, I was moved to pick up this 2016 compendium of her essays and speeches. It’s a guided tour through her generosity and powerhouse mind as she critiques the machinations of democracy, empire, justice, war, peace, even art itself—big, sweeping topics that, in her hands, become tangible human concerns. She moves the reader to action by the strength of her words and the clarity of her thought. – Julianne Escobedo Shepherd  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
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