THE DE-BUG UNIT
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, August 5, 2007
The vice principal of his San Jose high school looked him right in the eye.
"Raj," he said, "you'll never be anything but a high school dropout."
At the time, "it was just like an after-school special," Raj Jayadev recalls. "I thought, 'Are you kidding me?' " Such an ego-punch could have been flattening. Instead, he took it as a challenge.
"After that, I was motivated to prove that other people weren't better than me." A decade after his teacher's taunt, Jayadev had earned a political science degree from UCLA, won a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, founded a nonprofit in Silicon Valley called De-Bug and been named by Utne Reader one of "Thirty Visionaries Under Thirty."
In bestowing the title, Utne Reader described De-Bug - Jayadev's magazine and its offshoots - as a "combination zine and collective of workers, writers and artists that educates temp workers on their rights as employees," and "aims to inspire a rage to take action."
The glass door doesn't quite fit the frame at De-Bug's bare-bones office, which is inside the labyrinth of the Koll Circle industrial park in San Jose.
With a jostle, it opens to a kind of lobby, where Jayadev, 32, perches on the arm of a couch, his feet on the coffee table. Wearing a blue-gray T-shirt, jeans and Converse All-Stars, his head sleekly shaved and a tiny gold hoop in each ear, Jayadev has striking good looks and a low-key manner.
Just now, he is in the middle of an on-camera interview with a student from Santa Clara University, part of an oral history project for her multicultural journalism class. This is history to the 20-year-old blonde behind the Canon videocam. Founded in 1999, De-Bug is pre-millennial.
Jayadev squirms when people ask how the magazine's doing. "I don't really care how the magazine's doing," he says.
"I care how the people are doing. They could outlaw magazines in San Jose, they could kick us out of our office, unplug our electricity and take our computers, but we would still come back to that same Vietnamese restaurant and ask each other 'What do you want to do now?' "
After his video interview wraps up, Jayadev heads for that restaurant, Chez Croissant on First Street, where the group that became De-Bug first started meeting after work. He orders beef Pho and, using chopsticks to spiral noodles into a white ceramic spoon, begins to talk about his life.
Born in Milwaukee in 1975, he is the youngest of Leela and Tumkur Jayadev's two children. The Jayadevs had emigrated to Wisconsin from southern India after his father won an engineering scholarship - the beneficiary of affirmative- action programs launched after the nation won independence from Britain. "They came before 'the wave,' " he says, alluding to a swell in emigration from India to the United States 20 years ago.
In 1990, the family moved to San Jose; Jayadev was in junior high. By the time he entered Lynbrook High School, he had become a problem kid. He was skipping class and getting into trouble. When he dropped out during his junior year, his parents were stunned.
It didn't take long for him to regret it. That's when he went to the vice principal. And, after that snub, he took his high school equivalency tests and went on to junior college.
"That's when I started really getting into school," he says, and then he set his sights high, on UCLA, "the biggest-name school I knew." He got in, entering as a sophomore and a spring transfer student. The first time he ever set foot in Los Angeles was the day he moved into the dorms.
"I was this random guy who just showed up," he says, laughing. "But I felt so lucky. I remember thinking someone was going to come up to me and say, 'It was a mistake, and you have to go.' " He majored in philosophy, switching to political science after being electrified by a course in globalization taught by a woman from India.
"Until then, I hadn't met many role models," he says. She gave him what he calls "permission to be creative." Until then, he had never seen himself as a part of any group. But soon he became politically active, founding a South Asian student group focused on political identity.
"I was all about being South Asian," he says with a laugh, then grows thoughtful. "A weird thing happens with children of immigrants. You distance yourself from your background. But sometime in your late teens, the pendulum swings, and as dismissive as you've been about your ethnicity, it becomes the source of pride and identity."
When his parents asked what he wanted to do when he graduated, he said he planned to organize workers in India. "You think you can do what 100 Indians couldn't do?" his father asked. "You don't even speak the language."
College exposed Jayadev to the notion that the way to get ahead is to fill out an application.
When he found himself in the counseling center just days before commencement, he studied an array of glossy brochures. A leaflet caught his eye: "In five lines," it said, "tell the Oakland-based LeFetre Fellowship for Youth of Color why you should receive one of seven annual traveling scholarships." He filled it out and won a monthlong summer fellowship to India.
"I was totally fired up, I was at the peak of my rhetoric," he says. "I had all these romantic ideas about Gandhi and spirituality. I had researched all these 'social movement groups' I wanted to meet," he said. In such a state, he found his initial assignment - teaching basketball - deflating. But eventually, he was able to meet with these groups, traveling with tape recorder in hand while en route to his father's village in the south.
"On the train down, everything's collective," he says. "You're with people for a week. There are fewer social barriers than on the Greyhound here. If you've got a bunch of bananas, someone will just walk by and pull one off. I had a toy for my nephew that I was really pleased with, so I was playing with it. I passed it to the guy next to me, so he could play with it, and then he passed it to the guy next to him." It went all around the car before he got it back.
In his father's village, he stayed with his grandmother. He learned about his people, the Veershivaites (devotees of Shiva), and heard the language ( Kannada) that he had resisted learning.
"It was wild to visit where my father walked," he says, noting that his father didn't own shoes until he was in his teens. "They don't have concrete. There's one room for the people and one room for the cow." Jayadev learned that the history of the Veershivaites, a monotheistic branch of Hinduism, hinges on a mixed-caste revolt that was ultimately unsuccessful. "It was the story of a people who believed that everyone was equal," he says. "That's how our people started. It was there the whole time, but I'd never thought about it or cared."
He was riding a bus when he had another epiphany. "I looked up, and for a split second I tripped out, because all the guys look like me. All the older guys look like my dad. All the women look like my mother and sister," he says. "It seems superficial, but it meant a lot to know that I physically fit in. That I come from a place. There's a reason for me."
Once Jayadev got home, his only ambition was to return to India. "Here, everything seemed an indulgence," he explains. "In India, life is so precious, so fought-for. I wanted to live the principles I'd learned there."
To earn money for the trip, he got a temp job at Hewlett-Packard. It was 1998, and the dot-com boom was in full flower. "Silicon Valley was a rock star," he recalls. But he wasn't rubbing elbows with digital zillionaires. He was working on the assembly line, boxing laser-jet printers alongside the folks who keep the new economy humming - for $8 an hour. By his side were people of all ages and many ethnicities, from single mothers to grandfathers.
"You get to know people well when you're working these jobs," Jayadev says. "When you start work at 6 a.m., you're pretty raw. There's no pretense. You just woke up." His co-workers warned him to keep an eye out - the plant's temp workers' paychecks were being shorted. Repeated complaints had been made. The human resources department of the temp agency was looking into it. But nothing had been resolved and the shortings continued.
Inspired, Jayadev wrote a petition demanding that paycheck issues be resolved immediately and that all lost wages be reinstated. Co-workers passed around the petition, even translated it. Their enthusiasm took him by surprise. They were supporting their families on temp jobs - "they had the most risk and the least hope of change," he explains - and still, they wanted to sign their names. As one woman said, "I want them to know it's me."
Amazed by their courage, Jayedev asked one co-worker, an African American man in his late 50s, why he signed. "Because I know this stuff works," he told him. "My brother and I were involved in the civil rights movement back in the '60s." He remembered that as a time of dignity.
Another co-worker - a Hispanic woman in her mid-40s, born in the Central Valley and now putting her daughter through college - told him she signed because she remembered her mother taking her to the fields during Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' strikes.
"These people had a point of reference in their lived experience," Jayadev says. "They knew collective action works." When the petition was presented to the temp agency, it was just the leveraging tool they needed. "Every pay issue was resolved in two weeks, and it never came up again," he says. The lost wages were reinstated. It was a huge victory.
"The raw virtues - including courage and compassion for fellow workers - trumped all the other reasoning," he says. "That stuck with me, even now."
During this period, Jayadev began keeping a journal. He recorded the wisdom passed along by those working beside him in the shadow of the dot-com boom. Many were older Indian immigrants, who considered themselves his "automatic aunties and uncles." "They'd look out for me, give me advice - and ask when I was going to get married," Jayadev recalls. (He is in a long-term relationship with a woman who is also an activist.)
They told him their stories - how they came to this country, what they hoped for their childrens' futures, the sacrifices they had made. "Some were engineers or professors in their home countries - India, Somalia, Ethiopia, Central America," he says. "They were well-educated and successful, but it didn't transfer. Their supervisors were in their mid-20s, making at least a dollar more an hour, but they treated them as inferiors.
"People weren't really talking about that side of Silicon Valley," he says. But now, he was writing about it.
When a fight broke out on the line, one of his colleagues - an older Indian man from Goa - had a powerful reaction. "This wouldn't happen in India, because there, workers are united," the man said. "You wouldn't pick a fight with your brother." Other workers wouldn't stand and watch, he insisted. They'd intervene and stop it. "After that I picked his brain - he knew so much about organizing," Jayadev says. "All that knowledge was right beside me, and offering me chapati at the break!"
He wrote the story and posted it on a South Asian Web site. Suddenly, he was on the radar. Sandy Close picked up his signal. A long-time champion of ethnic and youth media, Close is executive editor of San Francisco's New American Media, a national coalition of news groups. After reading Jayadev's work online, Close invited him to be part of a television panel discussion on the "digital divide."
"Raj is a dazzler," Close says. "He has literary gifts but an organizer's instincts. That's a rare combination, and he's been very true to it."
Over coffee after the broadcast, she asked Jayadev if he knew others who could write about working in entry-level Silicon Valley jobs. He promptly enlisted a small band of co-workers from HP, explaining that New American Media was looking for stories from their lives.
Meeting to share ideas once a week at Chez Croissant, they soon had enough stories for a two-page spread - called "Voices of the Young and Temporary" - in a weekly publication of New American Media called Youth Outlook.
They delivered it by hand to lunch trucks all over Silicon Valley, and the publication was snapped up enthusiastically. "For a lot of people, it was the first time their reality was reflected," Jayadev says. Encouraged by their success, the group was determined to stick together. They found a name for their enterprise on the assembly line, where "the de-bug unit inspects a malfunctioning product, finds the root cause and corrects it," Jayadev explains. "That's what we wanted to do with the magazine."
The focus wasn't on learning skills, but on answering questions: Who do we want to become? What do we need to get there?
"The better we got to know each other, the closer we got. And the more we found that people wanted to talk about everything that mattered to them, not just work," Raj says. "They wanted to talk about their neighborhood, home life, relationships, even God."
With the help of a grant from New American Media, Jayadev and his band of young lower-wage Silicon Valley workers created a grassroots media group: They launched Silicon Valley De-Bug, a bilingual magazine of writing and art. It comes out in print form every other month or so; an online version is updated more often. They launched a radio talk-show and, with just one video camera and a computer editing program, produce a television show that can be viewed on the Web site (
www.siliconvalleydebug.com). De-Bug staffers consider themselves activists as well as citizen journalists.
"All the media stuff is just an excuse for us to build community in a really intimate way," Jayadev tells the Chronicle. "De-Bug is a tool for peoples' transformations. We've seen people break drug addictions, bad family cycles. We've seen people start expecting the world from themselves, when the world expected nothing from them," he says.
"Young people's facility with multimedia puts them ahead of the game," Close says. And they know it, if a recent New American Media survey of Californians, age 18-25, is an indication. The results took Close by surprise. "Where does this extraordinary optimism come from in this generation," she wondered, "especially at a time when it would appear that there is very little to be optimistic about" - including family dysfunction, neighborhood violence, high drop-out rates and rising tuition.
Then she understood: It's the Internet. "You have undocumented kids, kids with no particular support at home - but they're very optimistic," Close says. "They will hand you a business card that says, 'I'm a media content provider.' The Internet has allowed these kids to imagine being part of a global media culture."
The group's latest contribution to the culture is "De-Bug: The Underside of Silicon Valley," an anthology of the best work from the magazine. "Kinko's, that's our publisher," Jayadev says, with his easy laugh as staffers arrive for a meeting one recent afternoon.
They trickle in, in pairs or solo, as they have every week for seven years, meeting at the San Jose Peace Center, founded in a bungalow on South Seventh Street by anti-nuclear activists in the 1950s. This was De-Bug's first home, but staffers hold their weekly meeting here for more than sentimental reasons. The downtown location is handier for people to drop by after work.
Today, in the Peace Center's front parlor, beneath a black-and-white poster of a smiling Cesar Chavez, 10 people take seats around a conference table. The first order of business is "check-ins." As each talks about how they're doing and what they've been up to, story ideas percolate.
"One of my cousins just got out of jail," writer Shana White says. "I asked him about his job search and he said it's not easy, since he has a rap sheet. So he's living with a girl who supports him." He doesn't love her, but he calls the living situation his "program" for staying out of jail. After some discussion, the group agrees he's an in-house gigolo, and not an honest one.
Jayadev is more interested in a larger question: Does the story hint at a social trend?
"There are some people who think they've found a way to beat the matrix by living off others," he suggests. It's a way to survive when you're not part of the economy.
"Maybe it's working temporarily," Jayadev says, "but how do people break that kind of dependency on other people? Has anyone seen examples of people who broke the dependency?"
He isn't running the meeting. He's steering it. And he ends it like a sports coach: "You have something to write, write it."
Even natural leaders have moments of doubt, and while imagining De-Bug's future, Jayadev has had his share. "We're always told we do things wrong, that everything's *** backwards," he says. De-Buggers don't fill particular jobs; their job titles evolve from their interests. "We don't think about the product - how many magazines we can get out. We think about the transformative power of the process."
His confidence in the De-Bug approach got a boost when he got a chance to test it in an academic setting. Jayadev was the youngest of 25 leaders tapped by the Rockefeller Foundation for a 2004 Next Generation Fellowship. The group met in four cities over the course of the year to discuss the "future of democracy."
"When I went to these fancy Rockefeller forums - with these eloquent, well-resumed people - they'd have us discuss race and racial dynamics and they'd bring in an author of a famous book," he recalls. "But when I sat in those circles, it felt like the discussions were 10 strides behind the conversations we were having at De-Bug." After all, De-Bug was engaged from the start in drawing larger themes from everyday experience.
"Asking a group of people in San Jose - 'How do you define yourself if you have to tell someone on MySpace who you are?' - is a way of getting at identity in a more nuanced, and much more real, way than talking to a professor."
One of the Rockefeller fellows, a former White House aide, asked about De-Bug's potential for growth. "Can you scale it?" he asked Jayadev, who laughed and explained that De-Bug can't be franchised, since it takes its shape from the individuals within it.
Still, because of the success of the model, Jayadev soon had to face the fact that De-Bug was growing. Could they do so and stay true to their community values? His concern became a preoccupation. "Discouragement is infectious, just like courage is," Jayadev says. So he kept his worries to himself. Still, his mother sensed that he had something on his mind. Finally, visiting his parents' home one evening, he confided in her.
"She drinks this thing at night - warm milk, sugar and saffron - it helps her sleep," he says. As he was talking, she pulled a saffron stem to the lip of the cup. "Look at how pretty this is," she said. "This is the stem of a really beautiful flower. Imagine the flower." Jayadev thought, "Man, are you even listening?"
Then she tilted the cup so he could see the surface of her drink, covered with saffron stems. "Imagine all those flowers," she said. Jayadev realized she was telling him something about the power of imagination. "She could see all these flowers," he says. "It really put me at peace."
He thought of the positive influence De-Bug could have if it did grow. He thought of the lives that had already been transformed - and how many more could benefit - through De-Bug.
"It's like pulling one of the saffron stems to the edge of the cup," Jayadev says.
"Imagine the flower."
