Seven years: or, How I learned to love Lafayette
I moved to Lafayette, Indiana in 2009 for graduate school and would spend a total of seven years in the greater Lafayette area .Being a dyed-in-the-wool Texan, it was a bit of a culture shock; up until the age of 27 I had spent my whole life in Texas, most of that in the Rio Grande Valley. It took the support of my undergrad professors to even start thinking of moving out of state, in addition to the emotional and material support of my family. Suffice it to say, living in a place where both snow and humidity can co-exist was a bit of a brain buster. I still chuckle at the first eye-openers when I got there: my mom (who had helped me move into the glorified halfway house that was my first apartment) kept commenting on just how many green trees there were in the area. I marveled at the fact that I could easily ride my bike into campus OR ride the CityBus for free as a grad student. Every summer in downtown Lafayette, there was the Mosey Down Main Street with live music, food trucks, beer tasting and all of the good stuff you need to enjoy life along the Wabash.
Of course, us neurotic and sociopathic grad students needed a place to unwind every weekend, which led us to places like Hunter’s Down Under Pub (one of the last holdouts to allow smoking indoors), The Vault, and The Black Sparrow, which became the unofficial bar of the English grad students at Purdue. It was through that space, locally owned, that I met locals and learned a little more about the art and music scene that lived in the industrialized college town there in the Midwest. A good grad school friend of mine, who now lives there, introduced me to her now husband (and my mancrush), who in turn introduced me to so many characters in the Lafayette scene. I wasn’t linked in deep with people in the scene by any stretch of the imagination, but I got to know quite a few of them at places like The Spot, a local bar where the bartenders would blast their music of choice on the record player behind the counter and where there was some sort of live music/living art performance every week (and I saw some weird ones there, believe me).
Lafayette taught me that I best experience a place when I ride my bike through its streets: I can hop from the El Maguey to People’s, then pop over to a friend’s place, all the while learning the ins and outs of this unique town. This is how I acquire a sense of “place”, if you will, because driving mostly isolates you from the smells, sights, and sounds of an area and you move too quickly to really settle into the land and people moving through it. Which is why I would get frustrated with those same grad students who would almost go out of their way to talk about how “shitty” Lafayette was and, almost without fail, these would be people who came from coastal big cities. But these same people, who were ostensibly smart and sensitive, rarely (if ever) dug deeper than “I drove through downtown and went to one bar”. They’d complain about long wait times for the bus while I’d be in awe of the fact that we had accessible public transit in the first place since, being from Texas, I was taught that public or social goods and services were tantamount to communism. It always rubbed me the wrong way when I would hear these complaints, but I never quite understood why. Sure, I’m the first to hate on coastal elites, especially their sports teams (fuck the Lakers and the Knicks). And obviously, some of these places can be very uncomfortable for BIPOC folks, but that has nothing to do with Lafayette itself.
A friend recently tweeted a link about the connection between Lafayette, Indiana and The Dead Milkmen, and as I read it, I understood: I grew up in an area (and time) when we had to build our own art scene. I still have friends in the RGV who bring in national acts to play at local historical spots, or help support local creative spots like McAllen’s Creative Incubator. I had friends who threw/played shows at a place called Trenton Point, which was a sort of dance-hall/salón that served as an all-ages venue for young musicians/punks/burnouts who were tired of the top-20 hits on B-104. In one of the all-time most uncomfortable nights in my life, I even ended up unwittingly watching a burlesque show at historic landmark with my mom, all because I got tickets from a friend who failed to mention what the actual show was. Most people had no clue about this thriving art scene, but to those of us who wanted to be loud and weird, it was a fucking lifeline. It was validation that, at least in those spaces, people would support you in your maximum weirdness, and that’s what I saw and continue to see in places like Lafayette–communities of people who want to create space for themselves and others to do cool shit. But these spaces aren’t just out in the open because they’re still growing and, often, they exist in places where non-conformity is seen as distasteful at best (and dangerous at worst). Thus, some of them are hidden by design. Regardless, dismissing places like Lafayette as “cultural wastelands” does a disservice to all of the hard working badasses trying to make space for my fellow weirdos.
Ease off a bit. And start digging more.
