By LOLITA C. BALDOR and JON GAMBRELL (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Trucks carrying badly needed aid for the Gaza Strip rolled across a newly built U.S. pier and into the besieged enclave for the first time Friday as Israeli restrictions on border crossings and heavy fighting hindered the delivery of food and other supplies.

The shipment is the first in an operation that American military officials anticipate could scale up to 150 truckloads a day, all while Israel presses in on the southern city of Rafah in its 7-month offensive against Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

But the U.S. and aid groups warn that the floating pier project is not a substitute for land deliveries that could bring in all the food, water and fuel needed in Gaza. Before the war, more than 500 truckloads entered the territory on an average day.

The operation’s success also remains tenuous because of the risk of attack, logistical hurdles and a growing shortage of fuel for the trucks to run due to the Israeli blockade of Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage in that assault on southern Israel. The Israeli offensive since has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza, local health officials say, while hundreds more have been killed in the West Bank.

Aid agencies say they are running out of food in southern Gaza and fuel is dwindling, while the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N. World Food Program say famine has already taken hold in Gaza’s north.

Troops finished installing the floating pier on Thursday, and the U.S. military’s Central Command said the first aid crossed into Gaza at 9 a.m. Friday. It said no American troops went ashore in the operation.

The Pentagon said no backups were expected in the distribution process. The U.S. plan is for the U.N. to take charge of the aid once it leaves the pier. The world body’s World Food Program will then turn it over to aid groups for delivery.

Aid distribution had not yet begun as of Friday afternoon, said a U.N. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The official said the process of unloading and reloading cargo was still ongoing.

The U.N. humanitarian aid coordinating agency said the start of the operation was welcome but not a replacement for deliveries by land.

“I think everyone in the operation has said it: Any and all aid into Gaza is welcome by any route,” spokesperson Jens Laerke, of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told journalists in Geneva on Friday. Getting aid to people in Gaza “cannot and should not depend on a floating dock far from where needs are most acute.”

The U.N. earlier said fuel deliveries brought through land routes have all but stopped and that would make it extremely difficult to bring the aid to Gaza’s people.

“It doesn’t matter how the aid comes, whether it’s by sea or whether by land, without fuel, aid won’t get to the people,” U.N. deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said the issue of fuel deliveries comes up in all U.S. conversations with the Israelis. She also said the plan is to begin slowly with the sea route and ramp up the truck deliveries over time as they work the kinks out of the system.

Israel fears Hamas will use fuel in the war, but it asserts it places no limits on the entry of humanitarian aid and blames the U.N. for delays in distributing goods entering Gaza. Under pressure from the U.S., Israel has opened a pair of crossings to deliver aid into the territory’s hard-hit north in recent weeks.

It has said that a series of Hamas attacks on the main crossing, Kerem Shalom, have disrupted the flow of goods. The U.N. says fighting, Israeli fire and chaotic security conditions have hindered delivery. There have also been violent protests by Israelis that disrupted aid shipments.

Israel recently seized the key Rafah border crossing in its push against Hamas around that city on the Egyptian border, raising fears about civilians’ safety while also cutting off the main entry for aid into the Gaza Strip.

U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the pier project, expected to cost $320 million. The boatloads of aid will be deposited at a port facility built by the Israelis just southwest of Gaza City and then distributed by aid groups.

U.S. officials said the initial shipment totaled as much as 500 tons of aid. The U.S. has closely coordinated with Israel on how to protect the ships and personnel working on the beach.

But there are still questions about the safety of aid workers who distribute the food, said Sonali Korde, assistant to the administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which is helping with logistics.

“There is a very insecure operating environment,” and aid groups are still struggling to get clearance for their planned movements in Gaza, Korde said.

That concern was highlighted last month when Israeli strike killed seven relief workers from World Central Kitchen whose trip had been coordinated with Israeli officials. The group had also brought aid in by sea.

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Pentagon officials have made it clear that security conditions will be monitored closely and could prompt a shutdown of the maritime route, even if just temporarily. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, a deputy commander at the U.S. military’s Central Command, told reporters Thursday that “we are confident in the ability of this security arrangement to protect those involved.”

Already, the site has been targeted by mortar fire during its construction, and Hamas has threatened to target any foreign forces who “occupy” the Gaza Strip.

Biden has made it clear that there will be no U.S. forces on the ground in Gaza, so third-country contractors will drive the trucks onto the shore.

Israeli forces are in charge of security on shore, but there are also two U.S. Navy warships nearby that can protect U.S. troops and others.

The aid for the sea route is collected and inspected in Cyprus, then loaded onto ships and taken about 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the large floating pier off the Gaza coast. There, the pallets are transferred onto the trucks that then drive onto the Army boats, which will shuttle the trucks from the pier to a floating causeway anchored to the beach. Once the trucks drop off the aid, they return to the boats.

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed.

Minnesota Aurora has rekindled its efforts to become a National Women’s Soccer League expansion club.

The amateur women’s soccer club is finalizing a new deeper-pocketed ownership group and will throw its hat into the ring to become the 16th team in the NWSL, the top flight U.S. division.

NWSL currently has 14 clubs, with Boston set to become the 15th. NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman told ESPN in April the league is looking to make a decision on the 16th club in the final three months of 2024. The two new teams would then begin play in 2026.

“We are excited about our chances, but we also know there’s going to be some really tough competition,” Andrea Yoch, an Aurora co-founder and the club’s chair of investor relations, told the Pioneer Press this week.

The NWSL has seen exponential growth in franchise fees and sale prices of current clubs in recent years. Boston and Bay FC, which joined the league this spring, each paid an expansion fee of $53 million. The Portland Thorns sold for $63 million and San Diego Wave went for a record $113 million, with a $120 million valuation, in March.

Yoch didn’t share who is included in Aurora’s ownership group and didn’t know what the current cost will be to join the NWSL.

“It is literally a bidding process,” Yoch said. “So I keep telling everybody it’s just like if you’re sitting at a charity event, and you’re writing your number down on a piece of paper to see if you get the item that you want on the table.

“You submit a number, you hope it’s in the ballpark,” Yoch said. “The good thing is, if we’re close or within a couple of groups, I think we will get that feedback and be asked, ‘Hey, can you come up with some more money?’ But until everything submitted, we just won’t know.”

Yoch said NWSL has been open about how the expansion process is not just about the money, but also the expansion club’s overall market, the market size and its support for women.

Aurora, which has 3,080 community owners, has had strong fan and sponsorship support over its first two seasons in the USL W League. Aurora averaged 6,189 fans for home games at TCO Stadium in Eagan last year, and the Vikings have agreed to increase capacity to 7,000 for the 2024 season.

Aurora retained 90 percent of its sponsors from last season, have added nine new brands and will have more than $500,000 in sponsorship revenue this season, Yoch said.

“All of those things are going to be things that we have that no other city is going to have,” Yoch said.

Aurora’s proposal will also point to the success of the Minnesota Lynx in the WNBA, the Minnesota franchise in the PWHL and popularity of the Big Ten women’s basketball tournament at Target Center.

“We’re working hard on all the things that make Minnesota great and why we know players would be happy to live in our community, why they would feel safe living in our community; that’s a big thing,” Yoch said. “It is bigger than the dollars. Now, we also still have to come up with dollars.”

Aurora initially tried to join the NWSL in 2022 but pulled out because the still needed to “secure the necessary investment,” the club said that December.

“Unlike the last time,” Yoch said Thursday, “which was a little bit of a moonshot, this time I’m feeling really good.”

Yoch left her role as Aurora’s president to a role focus on generating investors. The club was started from scratch by a small group and then its community owners, but needed wealth.

“One of the things I say to everybody is the beauty of Aurora as it was founded by a group of normal people,” Yoch said. “The hard part about going out and finding this money is that the team was founded by a group of normal people. … But the amount of help and networking that we have gotten from leaders across the state has really once again been very humbling.:

Yoch said the new investor group is a mix of “men, women, Minnesotans, for the most part, and people who believe in what we’re doing.” Aurora’s 3,80 community owners will be included in its NWSL bid.

But without a fixed expansion fee set, how high can Minnesota’s bid go?

“They might say, ‘This is out of control,’ ” Yoch speculated. “Or maybe there’s a point where everybody says, ‘All right, if this is what it’s worth.’ And we know it’s going to double and triple within a few years, it’s going to be cheaper to get in now in 2024 for a 2026 season, then it will be in 2028 and 2030 because everything is skyrocketing for women’s sports.”

ESPN said about a dozen prospective ownership groups, including Denver and Cleveland, are expected. A bid in Tampa was a finalist in 2022 while Atlanta is believed to be putting a bid together.

Aurora has produced two undefeated regular seasons and a pair of playoff runs in the USL W League in 2022-23. Their third season starts May 23.

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Introduction by Lise Olsen

El Paso author Daniel Chacón likes to weave stories and dream up characters in the middle of ordinary episodes of life. The titular character of his new short story collection, The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions, came to him as he was walking his dog in Pecos, the windblown West Texas town where his father once lived. “It was really weird because there’s a lot of meth heads and there’s a lot of boarded-up windows,” he told the Texas Observer. He remembers spotting an ad for a manager at a fast food restaurant, one of the town’s best-paying jobs. The story took off when he thought: What would have happened If I had come up here after graduation?

Chacón is originally from Fresno and got a master’s degree in creative writing in Eugene, Oregon, but for decades El Paso and the border has been his home. A longtime professor, Chacón currently serves as chairman of the University of Texas at El Paso’s creative writing program, which bills itself as the nation’s only fully bilingual program, and he hosts a Sunday public radio program on KTEP called “Words on a Wire.”

“Okay, so the Chicano Time Traveler says to that pendejo Columbus, ‘Go home, whitey! We don’t need your ass over here.’”

In his life and work, Chacón, who is something of a philosopher himself, deeply probes limits and connections between the possible and the impossible, the imagination, the dreamworld, and what we call “reality.” For him, the U.S.-Mexico border is a place where those boundaries tend to disappear. Lately, he finds himself feeling like a time traveler in the undergraduate classes he teaches. Every year, he ages, and the cultural and literary references he uses become more unfamiliar to students, whose faces change but who remain forever young. “It’s not just in terms of age. I feel like I came from another time and place,” he said. 

Back in 1985, Chacón founded the Chicano Writers and Artists Association along with Fresno State classmate and friend Andrés Montoya. “I was a little younger when I joined the movement,” he recalled. “As progressive as they thought of themselves, it was all very male-centered and patriarchal and especially anti-gay,” he recalls. In one story in his new book, “The Chicano Time Traveler,” he explores how Chicano culture has evolved by recounting an exchange with an uncle whose ideas clash, sometimes hilariously, with inclusive Chicanx culture. Below is that story, from his 2024 book, reprinted in full with permission of the publisher Arte Publico Press.

The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions

“The Chicano Time Traveler”

Tío Rudy told me he had a story idea, and that he would sell it to me for a hundred bucks.

He said I would make lots of money, because it might be the most important story ever told. They might even make a Netflix series out of it, then I’d be rich.

“En serio. You could be successful.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Shit! Then how come you ain’t got no ruca?”

“Maybe having a girlfriend’s not my priority,” I said.

“Shi-it!” he said in two long syllables. “Everyone wants a ruca. Unless you’re…”

He looked me up and down.

“Anyway, bro. I’d write it myself, pero, ¿sabes qué? I don’t write too good.”

We were in the backyard of my abuela’s house on Mother’s Day, drinking beer, the sun falling down.

“Pero, my idea, it’s chingón!”

Rudy was an old-school Chicano, a living remnant and stereotype from the barrio. He even dressed old school cholo, and he had tattoos from his gang days, like a little dog paw above his left eye. He was a Fresno Bulldog, East Side. I say he was, because now, pulling the oxygen tank along with him everywhere he went, he didn’t participate in la ganga, but he did say, “Once a gang member, always a gang member.” He was proud to call himself a veterano.

“You’re a writer,” he said. “You could do this, homes.”

He actually used the word “homes,” as if traveling from the past. I hadn’t heard that word in at least two decades, not since the word was replaced by “homie” and “homeboy.”

Rudy was approaching sixty, and he looked it, not like a “forty is the new sixty look,” but like an old man.

His hair was balding, with some stubs standing up like under the power of static electricity, and his cheeks sagged down like a walrus.

“Okay, so check it out. Here’s the idea. It’s called ‘The Chicano Time Traveler,’ ese.”

I wondered, did anyone say “ese” anymore?

“Okay, so the Chicano Time Traveler… Man, this vato is a superhero. He goes through time, man, in and out of any time he wants, and he changes all the fucked-up things the gabacho has done to us, ¿entiendes? ¿Sabes qué? This fucker is mero mero! Like for example, say Christopher Columbus is coming to America, our hero travels in time and is right there on the beach waiting for that maricón.”

Ow, that hurts, I think. I ask him, “Why do you call Columbus a maricón?”

“I don’t mean a gay dude, m’ijo. I just mean, he’s a fuck head, ¿entiendes?”

“But why maricón?” I ask.

“All right, bro. Let’s say, instead of maricón,  pendejo. That better?”

“Less offensive,” I say.

“Okay, so the Chicano Time Traveler says to that pendejo Columbus, ‘Go home, whitey! We don’t need your ass over here.’

“And Columbus would say, ‘Nah, man! I’m here to get me some gold and shit.’

“Pero ¿sabes qué? The Chicano Time Traveler knows how to throw down chingazos, so he fucks up Columbus real good.

“And that gringo turns around and never comes back. And, ¿sabes qué? When the Chicano Time Traveler goes back home to Fresno or East Los or Chuco, or from wherever he lives in Aztlán, things would be different. Brown people would be in charge, man. Chicanos would be mayors and shit. Fucking lawyers and doctors and shit… And people struggling like me wouldn’t have one job. We’d have two jobs! Making la feria, ¿entiendes? All the native peoples would be hooked up, because we’re native, bro. Don’t forget that. I know you’re a little light-skinned, güerito, but it’s true. We’re fucking natives!”

“Okay, let me ask you just one thing,” I said.

“Want another beer?” he asked.

“Yeah!”

So, he grabbed two cans from the cooler and tossed me one. I caught it.

“So, what do you think of my story, bro! Pretty fucking brilliant, no?”

“Well… I have some questions. First of all: Why is he ‘Chicano’?”

“What the fuck you talkin’ about?”

“That’s an antiquated term,” I said. “Rooted in misogyny. Maybe he should be the ‘Chicanx’ or the ‘Latinx’ Time Traveler. That’s what the young activists are saying these days.”

“Fuck that. That’s sellout shit. I’m a Chicano.” And  he started to sing that old Texas Tornados song:

Chicano! Soy Chicano!
And I’m brown and I’m proud
And I’ll make it in my own way.

“Our young people today…” I said, interrupting his song, “…they want to leave out gender, too. It’s no longer fundamental to identity. In fact, why don’t you call it The Chicana Time Traveler?”

“He ain’t no girl,” he said.

“Might be better if she were,” I said. “But even if he is a he, why can’t we say ‘Chicana’? Why can’t that term mean an entire community of men and women and nongendered people? For generations we’ve used the term ‘Chicano’ to mean everybody in the barrio, although it’s clearly a masculine noun. Why can’t we use the feminine term—CHICANA—to indicate everybody? Why stick to patriarchal rules of language?”

“Fuck you!” he said and he walked away, dragging his oxygen tank with him. “Sellout piece of mierda!” he said. “I’ll take my story somewhere else, vendido.”

As I was trying to sleep that night, I had a dream about Rudy.

At least, I think it was a dream. It seemed real, somewhere between memory and a dream. We were in my abuela’s garage drinking beer, listening to some tunes, and everything seemed like virtual reality, like I knew it was all false, but the detail was amazing. I saw the United Farm Workers’ poster, and I could even see the glare of the garage lights on the smooth surface. Underneath the poster, I saw a worktable with some tools scattered about, a crescent wrench, a hammer, screwdrivers and some nails and screws. There was even an old 7-11 Big Gulp cup that must have been sitting there for a long time.

It was the 1990s. I was maybe sixteen years old. I wanted to be a writer back then, so of course I wrote poems and stories. This night in the garage, I read Rudy what I was certain was my best story. I don’t even remember what it was about. After it was over, he slowly shook his head.

“Dude, that was off the fucking wall! You’re going to be a famous writer. I know it in my gut, ese. You got talent!”

Rudy was a hard-core gangster in those days. He did all kinds of crazy shit, but whenever I was with him, he would try to be a good uncle. He would give me beer and smoke weed with me, but he felt an obligation to teach me something. In this memory or dream, Rudy suddenly got serious.

“¿Sabes qué?” he said. “No matter how famous you get, never forget you’re a brown man. They’re going to try to take you down, ese, but you got to fight,” he said. “Don’t forget your people. You got to fight the power.” And I believed him.

I took that with me when I got my bachelor’s degree in English. But since it quickly became clear that I was not likely to make a living as a writer, I went to law school and became a lawyer, an activist. For the last ten years I’d been working at a private law firm, and they were about to make me a partner, the first Latinx person in the firm to have such status. I was making good money, and every time we were allowed to do pro bono work, I always remembered Tío Rudy and tried to help out la gente.

In this dream, we were in my abuela’s garage drinking beer. We were listening to Led Zeppelin. And I said, “You know what, Uncle Rudy? I like your story idea. I think it’s really good, and I’d like to write it.”

“What story, fool?” he asked.

“The Chicano Time Traveler,” I said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

And I explained the idea he would tell me twenty years or so in the future. He laughed when I told him about Columbus getting his ass kicked by our cholo hero.

“That’s a great story, homes! ¿Sabes qué? I’m gonna remember that shit! You watch! I’m gonna remember that shit. ¡Por vida!”