“On Tent City, Jamie Berrout’s story “Valeria” asks, ’How bad do things have to get before you need to take action?’”
I started reading Jamie Berrout’s short-story collection Portland Diary the week President Trump tweeted out the alleged ban on trans military staff. I say “alleged” because not even high ranking officials in this belligerent war machine knew what the fuck he was talking about.
The opening story imagines a U.S. where trans folks have already been banned from military service and a philanthropist named Pretzel (based on real-life billionaire Republican Jennifer Pritzker) is donating millions to integrate trans people into the military.
I had to keep flipping to the cover of Portland Diary to make sure it wasn’t published just last week. I felt an eerie prescience surrounding the book, because clearly Berrout is a vidente, a seer, just like me.
Bruja recognize bruja.
Last night, as I was endless-scrolling through Facebook, I saw the breaking news that Trump has pardoned Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff of Tent City facing a 6-month slap on the wrist for over two decades of running what he lovingly called a “concentration camp.” And of course the first thing I thought about was Berrout’s story “Valeria” and how desperately we need this abolitionist shero to materialize and destroy this cruel prison experiment, and others like it, for real.
Valeria is a trans woman who runs a junkyard and befriends the people that come to sell whatever scrap metal they can find. Through this work, she learns about all the lives that have been destroyed by Tent City and the prison industrial complex at large. The more she befriends the people that come to the junkyard, the harder she works on a secret plot to attack Tent City.
Her then-girlfriend narrates this story, and although she understands the reasoning behind Valeria’s plot, she looks the other way rather than getting involved. In fact, she seems repelled by her own empathy towards the people Valeria is trying to help, afraid it will “erode the distance” between herself and “those issues.” While Valeria is the heroic focus of the story, the narrator is ultimately easier for most of us to connect to our daily lives: here in NYC we watch people waste away and die on public transit as we run past to catch the next train.
Right now, as I ask myself what risks I will take to actively fight a newly-emboldened but ever-fascist U.S.A, I am thankful for Jamie Berrout’s stories of badass trans women taking direct action against their oppressors. I take strength, and also caution, from these scenarios where the protagonists risk what little security they have to seize a moment of power, no matter how brief or dangerous. Peace has never been an option for so many communities under perpetual war, be it here on Turtle Island or abroad. So to me, Portland Diary feels like a collection of parables urging all of us to destroy first what will undoubtedly otherwise destroy us.

You can find Portland Diary by Jamie Berrout on Gumroad and support her work on Patreon.