Chicana Manifesto - Part I

The term “Chicana” saved my life.  The child of an immigrant, Mexicana, who was a single mother, I grew up in Los Angeles, in severe poverty, marinating in gang violence, surrounded by people who were abusing substances, and suffering from severe emotional and physical neglect.  When my mother, who I adore and who passed away when I was twenty years old, was intoxicated, she would scream, crouched in the corner of our Silverlake apartment, “Soy 100% Azteca!” I didn’t know who the Aztecs were, and I didn’t want anything to do with anything, that made my mother holler its name, when she was drunk. 

In middle school, my brother was incarcerated, my mother was at her worst in her drinking, we were evicted from our Silverlake apartment and neighborhood, which I had known my whole life, and we moved to South Los Angeles.  When I enrolled in Mt. Vernon Jr. High, I had to think quickly about how I was going to navigate the black and brown sea that was before me.  Never having considered my cultural or linguistic background, and therefore feeling no allegiance to the Latinos, and figuring that the Black kids were way stronger than the brown kids, I ditched the Latinos and joined the Black crowd.  I changed my name to “Angel”, attempted to talk like the Black kids, and I declared that I was Spanish and Black.  I don’t know how my peers bought that I was half-Black, and they didn't at all consider the improbability of my ghetto ass being a Spaniard, I was quickly accepted into their circle. 

The years that followed, my emotional life became more and more precarious.  Homelessness, alcoholism, hunger, and a complete deterioration of my home life, made me incredibly depressed and more than anything, it made me feel, nameless.  I was a nobody. All I had were my best friends from Hollywood High School, and everything else meant nothing. 

My older brother enrolled at Los Angeles Community College and he took a Chicano studies course.  I will say, that in the midst of the madness of my personal life, I WAS a reader.  I read everything that I could get my hands on, that helped me create meaning in life.  I eventually transferred to Marshall High School, for getting in a fight at Hollywood High, and I would ditch my classes at Marshall so that I could read in the school library.  Spraying perfume on the carbon copy of an old library pass, every day, I’d rewrite a new date on the pass, and skip a class to just go and sit in the library and read.  When my brother brought home his Chicano Studies books, I had no problem devouring the books.  Learning about the Aztecs, the pyramids in Mexico and the great civilizations, made me feel that I had something to be proud of.  Reading about the Chicano movement and the East LA blowouts connected the rage that I held so deep inside from all of my childhood experiences, to something palpable that I could direct my anger toward. I adopted social justice as my motto, and my work around issues of social justice is history.  From the moment that I laid my hands on those books, I became somebody.  I was, a Chicana. 

To be continued...