Riding the MBTA in Boston: A Guide for Black & Brown Girls

This award-winning narrative essay commandeers the MBTA map system to examine the tension between the “Fantasy Boston” of the Freedom Trail and the real Boston as experienced by Black and Brown women (particularly immigrants) in Boston.

Judge Sarah Minor writes: Riding the MBTA in Boston' is an image text co-opting the signage of public transport to reweave history with place. What arrives is a piece advising which T stops Black students should avoid along with highlighting “Fantasy Boston,” the city's suburbs good for “hooking up with handsome Eurotrash.” By combining humor, confession, and history with the visual language of infrastructure, this writer revives the subway’s path through histories that have receded, unwillingly, into its city’s subterrain. She makes her own map newly useful.

https://fourthgenre.org/multimedia/riding-the-mbta/