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INTERVIEW WITH MONIKA FROM BLACK AND BROWN PUNK SHOWS, BY MARIAM BASTANI.
Mariam: Introduce yourself please.
Monika: My name is Monika. I am the founder of Black and Brown Punk Shows Chicago and the founder of Audre’s Revenge Film production com- pany. I am 28 years old, based in Chicago. I am a community organizer, activist all around badass. (laughing).
Mariam: Tell us about Black and Brown Punk Shows Collective.
Monika: B&B Punk Shows started in 2010 by myself. It first started out as a fundraiser for Anarchist Peo- ple of Color, which I was a part of for about four years and Biblioteca Popular which is a community run space in Pilsen on Blue Island. They exist as a com- munity space that has performances community resistance and provides food and other resources
for the community free of charge; completely DIY and sustainable. We decided to have the event every year in order to promote and raise money for DIY and grass roots organizations around the city that specifi- cally catered to the QTIPOC community in Chicago.
Monika: The first year was my first time organizing
a major event. I had never organized a show before, but one of the reasons I moved to Chicago from Mil- waukee is because the significant brown punk scene that existed in Chicago. I thought it was really rad how there was space for us to create our own events and spaces. I decided to kick it up a notch by making it specific for QTIPOC. It was really formative because a lot of people that are now really major players in the scene, a lot of queer trans folks of color, I met them during that first show. It was a milestone for a lot of QTIPOC seeing they had the ability to create their own space and create their own events, solely to make them take their space in a world that caters to this general white hetero male. It was very complicat- ed because anything that you do within a cooperative lots of communication issues arise and etc., at the end of the day I tried to cull some consensus and try to come to a decision based on common ground. That’s usually how that shit gets done without some- body pulling some bullshit.
Mariam: What were differences in the scene and in general from Milwaukee and Chicago?
Monika: In Milwaukee it’s very white and male cen- tered. I actually moved back and forth from Milwau- kee and Chicago a lot because I also got involved with Bash Back!, which is this queer group that was around in 2007-2008. The majority of those people weren’t into punk music or alternative subcultures, but there isn’t really a lot of diversity in that scene
in Milwaukee because Milwaukee is also one of the segregated cities in the US. We have a contingent of punks and other radical people who come from small towns in Wisconsin that move to Milwaukee and liter- ally have will have only interacted with POC for the first time in their lives once they get to Milwaukee. There is a lot of passive micro aggressive behavior that people don’t necessarily realize they are per- petuating against People of color. When I was grow- ing up it was a little more blatant, I would definitely be tokenized, fetishized by a lot of the so-called friends of mine who were white. These were people would not see me as a black person, but as being like their ideal version of what a black person should be, which means someone subjugated and someone willing to take racist bullshit. I hung out with some messed up people who I had to detach myself from and luckily when I was in college I was exposed to a lot more
Mariam: How was the first year organizing that?