The Texas Chicano/a Workshop 2021
The Texas (USA) Chicanos/as, also known as “Team Brown,” recently held their biannual workshop. It was led by Lorenzo Garcia, the International Liberation Reference Person for Chicanos/as. We have held our workshops twice a year for five years. (If you were born and raised in Texas, please let me know. We would love to have you at our next workshop.)
Team Brown also holds a biweekly class and uses a group text to keep us connected throughout the year. Maria Limon led the group from its inception five years ago until she moved out of state last year.
At the workshop, Lorenzo did a masterful job of presenting useful information, thinking about the women, and doing counseling demonstrations.
I took away the following from the weekend:
Our connections with one another continue to grow stronger, making working on our hardest distress easier and the discharge more accessible. It was good to see Lorenzo’s counseling as he directed us to stay with the discharge.
Our history is important in terms of our ancestry and the generational patterns we still manifest in some way today. And also, it is our individual stories that make us who we are—each a unique Chicano/a and yet very much a part of a larger beautiful tapestry.
The productive demonstrations painted a picture of our struggles, our oppression (assimilation, loss of language, classism resulting in separation), and the internalized oppression we face as Chicanos/as.
Danny Lyon 1972 flashback photos and the music video “La Bamba Rebelde” were useful tools for discharge and showed the many faces of Chicano/a life.
Here are some comments from others:
- When we are all together, I am always reminded of how much trust we have built over the years. This makes it easier for me to go for [pursue for discharge] the deep and hard distresses.
- Recently my niece became interested in our family history. She and I spent two hours going over family names and how we had been raised. She was surprised at what a rich and valuable life her grandparents had had. She was especially interested in why they had come to the United States to live. That question is very important, as our families had diverse reasons for coming. All of our backgrounds are different—for example, some of us were raised poor, and others didn’t struggle with finances. We are a “mixed bag” of lives. All are important. It is in these beautiful differences that we are able to go back and find when our hearts broke. Mostly we didn’t complain or express our pain or fear. It was the example our parents had given us. They’d had to go through it, and we did too. How I would love to have been able to explain to them that it was all right to cry out in pain, to express fear, to not pass the legacy on.
- It felt to me like we were all working on distress related to our fathers. It was liberating for me to watch us discharge and reach for the male figure in our family who carries a lot of weight in our hearts. I think all of us have in some way been disconnected from him, even those of us who had good relationships.
Houston, Texas, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Latinos/as and Chicanos/as
(Present Time 204, July 2021)