My Top 3

Like most girls, I like things that look good to me. I like bright colors, beautiful patterns, and a dash of ugly just to make you remember the world isn’t perfect. Throughout my life I’ve attended Catholic Schools. There were times when I was super into it, praying at home, going to mass and accepting everything the priest said, wanting to become a nun etc. But the majority of my life I never felt a real connection to the male God with his white beard floating in the clouds somewhere. However, one figure I always felt comfortable with was La Virgen. So pure (being the virgen and all), so loving, so beautifully depicted. I would love when the Day of the Virgin would come about at our church because ,being located in Santa Ana, so many people came to see her in our church and bring her bouquets of flowers. At St. Jospeh’s church, she had her own corner where a beautiful picture of her hung with a kneeling pad in front of her. I often times just knelt there to examine every part of the picture; the eery horns at her feet, the bright, tiny stars on her shawl, and the serenity in her face. Suffice it to say, she is my favorite woman of all time, but to really get a feel of who I am you have to understand my love for my other favorite women.

When I was younger, my mother had a huge thing for Diego Rivera and his art. The simplicity of his paintings told a great story of Mexican life that my mother loved to have visible for all to see. She even had a head board made out of wood that depicted this beautiful image:

I loved all this artwork, but when my mother introduced me to Frida Kahlo my love quickly shifted. She was a sight to see with her unibrow and stoic face. Most people think she’s hideous, but I regard her as one of the most beautiful women. She endured many hardships, from paralyzing accidents to a very confusing marriage to Diego Rivera, but always did what she wanted. Never succumbing to other’s influence, she painted beautiful and horrendous sights, many being self portraits. She liked pushing the envelope and being free. She toyed with her sexuality instead of accepting the machismo and patriarchal society. To me she is strong, independent, beautiful, and creative.

My final favorite woman of mexican association is none other than the fictional Sirena from the beloved Loteria game.

This was, and forever will be, my favorite game. The beautiful, colorful pictures of the different characters always made me so happy. So much better than “gringo” bingo because it had color and characters like el diablo, el borracho, and la sirena who floated half naked for all to see and admire. For a while I was ashamed to play a game where a woman’s breasts were so visible for even young boys to see; somewhat pornographic and inappropriate. Today, she is my favorite character. Though she is a fictional character and not even fully a woman, she represents mexican femininity for me. She stands (or floats rather) strong with her back straight and her arms in the air looking sexy, but not necessarily doing it to please the players of the game. She isn’t overtly sexual. She is subtle yet powerful like all mexican women, or at least me.

Mexicans with Questions

Like I said in my last post, I am proudly from Orange County. In OC we have a magazine called the OC weekly with different restaurant reviews, concerts, articles etc. One of the best parts of the OC weekly is Gustavo Arellano’s section aptly named Ask a Mexican. Here is a picture of him and the book he subsequently wrote due to the fame of his articles.

A recent question a reader asked was this:

DEAR MEXICAN: As a college-educated Mexican-American, I’ve had my fair share of Chicanas in college . . . all of which my jefita considered putas with books. But now that I’ve graduated, I’m going out with a gabacha for the first time. She’s nice, bilingual, tall, skinny, educated and a liberal with liberal gabacho parents who accept my brownness. I finally found a woman who doesn’t want to control me a su manera or hacerme pendejo, and my jefita is STILL against it. How can I get my jefa to accept my lil’ snow bunny?

This one caught my eye because I too have experienced my mom disliking my “gabacho” boyfriend. His name is Justin and we’ve been dating for a little over a year now. When i first told my mom about him and how he was 4 years older than myself she immediately rejected him. “Ok, you can do whatever you want, but I don’t really care to meet him”. These were some of the first words my mother ever said about him; real encouraging. So I dated him anyway, though I felt as though I was always betraying my mother or going against her wishes. While I studied abroad the fall of last semester, Justin really made an effort to get to know my family. He invited my mother and brother on a lunch date so that they could get to know each other a little better. My mom eventually warmed up, but still just didn’t like something about him.

To give you some background, my mother runs stuff. You, know how there are those men who are outspoken, get mad when dinner isn’t on the table, and just are overall in control? Yeah, well that’s kind of what my mom is like. She doesn’t take lip from anyone especially men. My grandmother was also very strong willed and outspoken, however, my grandfather still controlled the house and his woman; my mother vowed to be different. Justin is a good guy. Religious and deeply convicted he’ll also tell you what’s on his mind, what he thinks is right and wrong. Like my mother, he won’t back down from a discussion until he’s said his peace.

So suffice it to say, they butt heads a lot. What is also very interesting that I have noticed is the cultural differences that end up being points of confusion for both of them. Mexican culture is so rich with rules and regulations about how to act that sometimes its difficult for you to be yourself. For example, one night Justin and I stayed up late with some friends. The next morning my mom was due over for a visit. Justin was out of it; tired and a little hungover from the night before. As I hurried around making sure everything looked just right for my mother, he rested which i had no problem with. So my mom gets there, sees him on the couch and says hi. He doesn’t get up to say hello and offer the hug and all that she expected. He explains later that he is very tired and sorry that he isn’t his animated self. Later when it’s just me and my mom in the car she tells me she doesn’t like him. That it was rude of him not to get up and greet her and that she doesn’t want to see him anymore. “He’s your boyfriend, just don’t bring him around me”. Gee, awesome, mom. I explained the situation to Justin who didn’t understand her problem. Was it just some cultural mix-up or was he really being rude? He apologized anyway, though he still didn’t understand. She accepted his apology (over facebook), but has held a grudge ever since and refuses to have him around. Problemas, problemas.

No se daña a quien se quiere, no!

      I often find that when I attempt to convey my thoughts, feelings, and emotions in Spanish, the expressions appear to be more heartfelt. I really appreciate listening to music in Spanish because I believe that the feelings the songs attempt to convey are by far more profound than what any song in English could ever come up with. The love songs are invoked with passion, but not every love song has a positive message behind it.
      When I first heard “Malo” by Bebe, I was taken aback by the powerful emotions the performer conveys. The song is about a woman who has been a victim of domestic violence and now feels empowered to overpower her abuser. The tone of the performer first reflects lament, but the bridge of the song reveals a change in tone in which the performer begins to echo courage and strength. My favorite part of the song is the chorus because the woman realizes that she no longer has to be a victim, that she does not deserve to be mistreated, and that she can rise against her oppressor. Take a listen:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Snf6G9T_Yg&w=370&h=265]

      The narrator of the song begins by describing the kind of relationship she shares with her partner. She lives in fear, desperate for relief from the abuse she continues to withstand. She pleads to him, asking him to keep his voice down so that it will not wake the children from their sleep. She begs to him, asking him to stop hurting her. She is left alone for a moment, so she begins to reflect on their relationship: She is anxious when he is home, and she is relieved when he is not. She has become worn-out with time, and she recognizes that it is because of how he has treated her.
      The narrator then allows us to peer into her thoughts. She has become resentful, and she vows that she will find the courage to one day finally stand up to her partner. She wonders if he finds empowerment in his actions. Does it make him feel more like a man? She challenges him, and she feels empowered enough to raise her own voice against his.

            Voy a volverme cómo el fuego, voy a quemar tus puños de acero
            y del morado de mis mejillas saldrá el valor para cobrarme las heridas.
            Malo, malo, malo eres, no se daña a quien se quiere, no!
            Tonto, tonto, tonto eres, no te pienses mejor que las mujeres!

      The narrator shares a lot of the same experiences as the mother from Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed by Josie Mendez-Negrete. The mother puts up with the father’s abuse for several years before finally deciding to take a stand for her daughters. Mendez-Negrete’s story is one in which oppression, abuse, and shame are blanketed by a system of patriarchy that has devalued the experiences of the female characters. Much like this song, Mendez-Negrete’s novel has become a means through which the female characters can come to terms with their abuser’s legacy.
      The complete lyrics to “Malo” by Bebe from her debut album Pafuera Telarañas (2004) can be found here .

Viva Santa Ana!

Growing up in Orange County I got a healthy dose of all kinds of people. For a while, my family and I lived in areas like Tustin and Irvine; the more white, conservative parts of North Orange County. I never knew exactly why we moved to places like this where we were much further away from family and people who spoke spanish. Looking back I can see that it was an attempt by my parents to raise me “right”.
If you’ve ever been to a place like Irvine you know how plastic and manufactured it feels. Everyone’s pretty wealthy and if you’re not then you really don’t belong. Police around that area today make sure to find all the homeless people and kindly escort them to where they ought to be: Santa Ana. As a kid I wasn’t hyper aware of my status among my neighborhood friends. I had some black friends and some white friends; don’t recall there being very many Mexican or Latino families around.
My father grew up dirt poor in Mexico City. He went to school, played basketball, walked the straight and narrow and eventually became very successful. My mother was born into an immigrant family in Santa Ana and had always wanted better for her children and herself. I think that somewhere in their minds they associate “la raza” with being lower in social status. They had worked all their lives not to live where their people were, but to move up the social ladder and hopefully become more successful by associating with “gringos” and having their daughter do the same.
Today, I am glad I have had the opportunity to makes friends of all colors and social statuses. Luckily, my parents eventually moved back to more diverse neighborhoods like Orange and Santa Ana, which really helped me cultivate my Chicana identity, even if it is a little on the “white-washed side” as some would say. During high school, my mom was living in good ol’ Santa Ana, while I attended one of the best private schools in California. Living in a small, two bedroom apartment surrounded mostly with Mexicans, then going to school 2 miles away where white kids outnumbered us was crazy. But like back when I was a kid, I made friends and eventually looked past our social and economic differences. I hope, when I have children, to make sure that they live and experience a more diverse area than Irvine or Tustin. I understand my parents’ want to make sure I got the best life as a child, but I realize today that that was just never the place for me.

Natural Cures vs Corporations

 

In high school I got very sick with Pneumonia and Mononucleosis at the same time. Initially I thought it was something minor but I was just getting worse and worse and ended up loosing about fifteen pounds. So my mom took me to see a doctor.
The doctor recommended that I take antibiotics, like always. Around this time I had just finished reading a book called Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About by New York Times best selling author, Kevin Trudeau. This book really shocked me because it presented facts and ideas that up to that point in my life I had never thought about. Some of the ideas in this book are that there are only a small group of people that control the mass media. The media outlets are corporations and there are about twenty-three corporations that own more than one-half of all the daily newspapers, magazines, movie studios, and radio and television outlets in the United States. The only knowledge I had previous to reading this book was from the mass media. The media virtually never mentions anything about natural cures for anything. The media is influenced by the Corporations and a very often overlooked type of corporation is the drug companies. The media is profit oriented in purpose.

The drug companies are corporation too just like the rest of them and there number one goal by law is to make a lot of money for their stockholders as described in the documentary The Corporation. Media time is being bought by these drug companies, and that is a lot of media time, so these networks would most likely not say anything negative about these drugs.

In the corporation it also describes a case in which some Fox reporters did a story on
the negative side effects of Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone that was in the cow’s
milk. Monsanto is a big sponsor for Fox and Rupert Murdoch owns Fox. Fox had them change the story and tried bribing them not to reveal the links to cancer from the milk anywhere. Eventually Fox just told them “the news it what we say it is.”
They news usually say only positive things about these drugs and it would definitely be
bad for profit of the media outlets and the drug companies if people knew of an
alternative to these drugs that were more effective and had no side effects.

When I went to the doctor I told her that I did not want to take any antibiotics because of all the negative side effects. She told me that if I didn’t take antibiotics I would end up in the emergency room. I am sure she had good intentions, but I felt very strongly about not taking the antibiotics. She randomly brought up that I need to get a TB test. I said I did not want a TB test, She then said if I did not take it then she would call some people to hold me down. I told her once again that I did not want any TB test. Then she informed me that she had just called for some people to hold me down. In my head I thought of two options. My first thought was I am going to hurt someone really bad if they try and force me to do something against my will. Then I thought I should really try to avoid violence if I can, so I ran as fast as I could out of that hospital.

I saw a holistic doctor who graduated from Loyola Marymount University and he treated me by removing the energy blockages in my body, treating past emotional traumas related to my illness, and with herbal and other remedies. He also used a technique called the bi-digital O-ring test that he used to determine energetically what was wrong with me and what remedy would be most effective for me personally. The media is very manipulated by the few elite and has an extremely strong influence on us in a variety of ways. To this day I have not taken any prescription or non-prescription drugs. It has been over six years that I have been drug-free!

Sources:
The Corporation. 2003. Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.

Trudeau, Kevin. Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About. Alliance Publishing Group Inc. 2004

FAUX photo from: www.rockcitynews.com

My Fishy Coming Of Age Moment

For the last two summers I have been working at a fishery in Alaska. You are probably wondering how I ended up working there. My best friend happened to be working up there for a few years and had just been promoted to be a manager. I had always wanted to go work there for the summer and he said I could probably work in his section. So, I decided to go.

I had never been on a plane before up until this point so this in itself was pretty big for me. I was very nervous. I got off the plane to the smallest airport I had ever seen. It was about the size of a classroom. The town that would be my home for the next two and a half months had a population size of about 3,000 people. My best friend picked me up from the “airport” and showed me around the town. The downtown area where the fishery was and all the stores was just one block long. I thought, “wow, this is going to be very interesting.” I was pretty excited but nervous because I had no idea what to expect.

I was going to be living with my friend at his trailer for the summer. My home was going to be a mattress on the floor that we “bought” from the Salvation Army. What I mean is, we saw a mattress close to midnight that someone had left in front of the store and we said, “we’ll take it.” My friend had told me that we would be working long hours and I was all for it. I came to make some money, and he was not kidding about the hours.

On a typical day I started work at 5am or 6am and worked until about 10pm or midnight. The work was not complicated but it was a lot. I did several different tasks there like traying fish or filling up baskets of fish from a conveyor belt of fish that would never end… I remember waking up after about one week of working and feeling like someone had beat my body all over with a baseball bat. I was hurting so bad. I asked my friend, “Is the pain going to go away?” He said, “yeah, don’t worry.” “Your body will get used to it.” After about two weeks my whole body stopped hurting and changed to just one random part of my body that would hurt each morning. I was okay with that though.

Even though I was working some crazy hours, I still wanted to hang out with my friends for a little after work and get a bite to eat or have a drink or two. My logic was: “I am going to feel like shit when I wake up anyway. So, why not?” For almost an entire month I was getting about 2-4 hours of sleep. I thought that a human being would die with that little sleep but apparently not. Eventually, I slept about six hours one night and woke up with my uvula swollen. ( You know that punching bag in the back of your mouth.) I was freaked out because it felt like I was going to swallow that thing, but once again my friend said, “don’t worry, it’ll go away.”

We worked long hours and it really made me appreciate the value of a dollar. I had a blast though. While I worked I would always be cracking jokes and made some great friends. There are some really interesting characters that worked there. There were college students from the Ukraine and Mexico as well as people in there fifties and sixties. There was a big range of people. I really enjoyed working there and am very thankful and blessed to have had such an amazing experience.

On a more personal note

Gloria Anzalúda’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was one of the books that I briefly spoke about during my presentation in class this past Monday. I’ve been thinking about what I said about the book and I’m going to admit that I didn’t do it much justice. I may have mentioned that everyone quotes it and that it is such a foundational book for Chicana feminism, but I think I gave a watered down interpretation and I’d like to expand and say what the book means to me. So maybe, let’s call this a book review, but one that much more centered around my own personal experiences and how it’s helped me on my coming of age.

To start with, I think that the book is absolutely brilliant. Anzaldúa is able to beautifully articulate what it means to be a Chicana/o or a mestiza/o, to be a person that comes from different cultural backgrounds, how any of those cultures push and pull you in either direction, what it is like being a woman of color, and what it means to live on the borderlands, both physically and metaphorically. Her writing is fluid- going from prose to poetry, from English to Spanish. It’s slightly like theory, but then there is a spiritual side to it. She is able to pack in so much reality into 200 or so pages. If I had half the brain that Anzalúda had I’d be happy.

The part of the book that really stands out to me is the the chapter entitled “La conciencia de la Mestiza, Towards a New Consciousness,” and more specifically the poem “Una lucha de fronteras.” Which reads as follow:

Because I, a mestiza,

contiunally walk out of one culture

and into another,

because I am in all cultures at the same time,

alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

simultáneamente.

This chapter and this poem specifically speak quite a bit to me. I grew up in a household that had two ethnic backgrounds. Growing up this didn’t really phase me. Both cultures complemented each other very well. My grandma spoke to my sisters and me in Spanish, my mother and her spoke to each other in this broken Spanglish, it was only when there was some good type of chisme did they speak full on Spanish. My father fit in well, speaking his made up Spanish and using words he caught on to here and there. During the Holidays we’d celebrate Thanksgiving in a pretty traditional way with turkey and rhubarb pies, a recipe that came from my dad’s family. During the Christmas season it’s all about las Posadas, tamales, mole, loud relatives. As a kid I figured this is what everyone’s family was like.

It wasn’t until those standardized tests we had to take that made you fill in one bubble for your racial/ethnic background. Here I was faced with the really daunting task of claiming one identity and leaving the other behind. Those forms bothered me all the way up into high school, where I can vividly remember a teacher of mine making a joke about the “other” option that they always put, which I had usually filled in. I went to a predominantly white Catholic high school and all of the rest of my classmates laughed along with the teacher. I missed the joke and they missed the fact that those questions aren’t as trivial as they seem.

It wasn’t until my first Chicana/o Studies class that I first picked up this book by Anzaldúa and read this chapter and FINALLY found the vocabulary to talk about these issues. Anzaldúa isn’t speaking exactly to my situation, but I think I can understand where she is coming from and I can interpret it in my own way. I still have loads of issues with being mixed, with compromising between one and the other, I could go on, but I think reading this work by Anzaldúa helped me in my own coming-of-age. I still think it’s an on-going process, but it’s great to see others that deal with the same types of struggles.

And I’ll end with a quote from one of my other favorite half-breeds, Frida Kahlo, who sort of wraps this all up for me. She said,

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”

Masked beauties and lethal.

 

Masked beauties and lethal.

I was chilling out with one of my sisters a few days ago. I was talking to her about the coming of age class I am taking. While we where talking one of my favorite song came on the television, and it started to make me thinking of what I really want to present to my class mates on Monday. The song is from a band called Rage Against the Machine, and the song that was Play on the television was People of the Sun. Which to me makes perfect sense because it stated to make me think of something I felt dear and near to my heart in the mid 1990’s was the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, in the Southern part of Mexico.

The reason is simple to me because it incorporates pretty much everything we have talked about all this semester of women coming of age. This was a movement that started with the indigenes Indians of Chiapas fighting the government from having American oil companies coming to their state and displacing them for corporate greed. The Zapatista movement started with peaceful demonstrations and marches, but that did little for the Mexican government from having their northern neighbor from invading their lands. With major power forcing them off their lands many of the people started to take arms to protect their lands from invaders.

People of the Sun, is how I feel about the Zapatistas in Chiapas because it was a movement that was out of force and fear for the survival of the people of that area. But a major force for the Zapatistas was the women of the women of these small towns. Women made the majority of the force due to the displacement of the men going north to find work to support their families. So with women of these rural areas taking up arms transformed the women from being just supporting role members of the town , to protectors of not only the town, but also their culture, traditions, and rituals that would have been lost due to the displacement of these people.

The women were commanded by Commandant Marcos, but at least eighty-five percent of his force was rural women. It was not just young women that started to take arms for the battle they envisioned that was coming to a head. But it was also grandmother, mothers, daughters, and grand daughters that started to form an army that would fight Mexican troops from being displaced from their home land. So when women left the comforts of being mothers, cooks, wives, caregivers and what ever else you might feel Mexican women should be. But with the action of taking up arms to protect their interest in their town, these women went from being seeing as caregivers, daughters, wives, girls into freedom fighters.

Scars of Love

I was ushered into a quiet room away from all the whining children and bustle of the hospital. I laid in bed covered in white, warm blankets. Not too far away sat Abraham, my little brother, also in a white warm bed. The nurse poked me with a needle and bright blood dirtied the sheets. I grew fuzzy and I lost consciousness. I woke up to two new scars just above my butt. Abraham woke up with a crimson blood bag floating above his bed hooked up to his veins. The transplant had been successful.

I’ve never been in a hospital for more than a night. Never broken a bone. Never needed surgery. Abraham was 12 when leukemia first took him prisoner. Today I look at my two dark circle scars with confusion and anger. They sit just above my butt cheeks. The scars feel different than every other part of my body; slightly raised and darker than the rest of my skin. They are signs of sacrifice and love. He needed a bone marrow transplant and I was his match. I never cared about the pain I just wanted my baby brother to be healthy. He passed a little over a month ago, but these scars of love will follow me just as the memories of him will: forever.
Until Reina asked us to to write about our scars I had never really thought about mine. Since his passing I desperately wanted for a permanent reminder of his love and joy in my life. I considered getting a tattoo somewhere on my arm. Then I would always feel him close. Not until yesterday did I realize that I had had the most significant sign of our love already marked on my body. After the transplant my blood ran through his veins. He had my DNA. I jokingly nicknamed us twins. I have given up the ridiculous tattoo idea. I will continue on my brothers legacy of laughter and happiness and will never forget where my scars came from.

Music in the Soul

Earlier in the week I was discussing with my rooommates how our parents have influenced our taste in music. My roommates, Cooper and Paige, are caucasian so it was no surprise to hear that their fathers introduced them to bands like Hootie and the Blowfish, Led Zeppelin, and other “classics”. This led me to ponder my childhood and the type of music I was raised on.
It’s weird, the first record I ever bought was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors and my first cd was Nirvana’s In Utero; my Mexican roots nowhere to be found. But if you look deep enough in my iPod you’ll find a pretty eclectic assortment of my parents’ favorite music. My love for the Gipsy Kings comes from my dad. I fondly remember listening to songs like “Volare” and “Bamboleo” on Saturday drives with him; not a care in the world, just a father and his daughter. My spirit jived with the infectious spanish guitar that could be found in every song.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNgSeJzLJFc]

Now my mom,on the other hand, she’s a different story. Having been born in 1967, she was an 80s kid growing up in Santa Ana where Mexican culture fused with SoCal culture creating a funky kind of Chicano. Bands like Mary Jane Girls, Teena Marie, and Rick James played the jams. She was also no stranger to new wave stuff like Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears. As a kid I was fed all of this amazing music. Our home and car was always full of joy and dancing. As I grew older I gained a new appreciation for the music my parents listened to. It became a link to my childhood. Sometimes I’ll hear some Rick James on the radio and instantly think of my crazy mother belting out the words to Mary Jane. Other times I’ll turn on some Gipsy Kings just to be reminded of my calm father. When I was younger he used to play his Spanish guitar at night softly to himself. I would sit on the stairs and listen to him play, but made sure not to be seen; I wanted every sound I heard to be the sounds he felt, not influenced by an audience.
Music is such a huge part of not only our family, but I think Mexican and Latino families in general. We’ve got a rhythm in our souls. We’ll dance to any beat we hear on the radio or on the streets. I look forward to having children someday and watching them as they explore their own lives through music because it has been one of the biggest influences in mine.