My Life Story and Struggles
Thank you, Lorenzo [Lorenzo Garcia, International Liberation Reference Person for Chicanos/as], for giving us a push to share our life stories and struggles. You’ve been an example of solidarity and support in this effort.
Ever since we met in an RC class in the early 1980s, you’ve been a constant ally and friend, no matter where I’ve roamed or what tight spot I’ve gotten myself into. I thank you for your commitment and companionship.
MY PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS
It was both a wonderful experience and a challenge to be raised by two folks like my parents. My mom, a Mexicana, was born along the Mexico-U.S. border in the 1920s and then taken to and raised in Aguascalientes, Mexico. My dad, a first-generation bilingual/bicultural Chicano, was one of eleven children in a poor family.
Both of my grandpas were in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. One was a militant for the reform president Francisco I. Madero. The other was a child and saw armed campesinos (General Pancho Villa’s troops) come through his town. So our family had a connection to the greatest, most violent Indio-Mestizo poor people’s upheavals in the Americas. To my lifelong regret, my grandmothers died before their husbands and before I came along, so I never heard their side of the story.
After the Revolution, my maternal grandfather participated in an anti-clerical campaign against a Catholic Church-sponsored counterrevolution. In his later years, he was a mechanic and bracero field laborer and travelled as far as New York and Indiana (USA). My abuelo [grandfather] and I always had a special connection. I miss him still.
My father’s neighborhood in El Paso [Texas, USA] was called the Second Ward or Segundo Barrio. It was a tough place. People referred to the tenements as presidios (prisons). My grandparents and aunts made sure that my father dedicated himself to school. As a teen, he was pressed into a gang. He fought in the Korean War in the early 1950s, survived combat, and returned to El Paso.
I tell people that even though my mom made it only to the sixth grade in Mexico and I completed some “higher education,” she was “a thousand times smarter and more intelligent than me.” My old man [father], even though he was overcome by his distresses later in his life, taught me that we were right to question the system and not go along with [agree to] racism, other oppression, exploitation, and inequality.
INFLUENCES AND ACTIVISM
The biggest influences on me were my immediate and extended family, the church, my old man’s [my father’s] barrio, and the Chicano Movement (La Causa).
I came of age in El Paso, was enrolled in Catholic parochial school from the first to the eighth grades, and then attended a Jesuit high school.
La Causa had a huge impact on my formation as a person. It swept into my hometown like a tornado, and I was completely caught up in it [involved with it]. My father took me to the 1972 La Raza Unida Party Conference in El Paso. It was an eye-opener.
I think that at age fifteen I had already decided to be revolutionary. I participated in my first action at that age, helping to disrupt a City Council meeting to demand youth summer jobs.
As a young adult, I met United Farm Workers co-founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez. I worked in the agricultural fields in California [USA]’s San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys alongside campesino organizers who further influenced my political and personal outlook.
The Movimiento encouraged me to reclaim my Indio heritage, to be proud of being Indigenous, to go against the internalized racism and self-hatred that had come from one colonialist conquest after another. I’ve had countless Co-Counseling sessions on early memories of being referred to as “ugly” or not worthy, due to my brown skin. This has made a difference, but sometimes, when I catch my reflection in a window or a mirror, I might still mutter, “What an ugly [expletive].”
I’ve fought to reclaim the Spanish language in the face of “English only” Anglo schooling on the Mexico/U.S. border. My mom spoke Spanish to us, which helped us remain comfortable with being what we were—hijos de Mexicanos [children of Mexicans]. Working in RC with Mexican/Latin American Co-Counselors has helped me in my project to become fully myself.
AN EARLY HURT
When I was three years old, I had severe tonsillitis. In those days they removed the glands surgically. I have a memory of an adult man, a nurse, holding me down and forcing something on my face. I think he was giving me anesthesia for the surgery. I fought him with all my might, with every cell in my little body, with every ounce of my strength, with all I had—and he won. And because I couldn’t keep him off me, I concluded that no matter how hard I fought, how hard I resisted, I could never win. This got laid in as a distress recording.
Many times later—as a boy, as a youth, as an adult—when I had the chance to achieve something that was important to me—play on the basketball team, win the 440-meter run, develop artistic or musical talent, finish college and a PhD program, hold on to a job I liked, stay in a good relationship—I gave in [succumbed] to feelings of defeat and quit before I could attain the goal. I still discharge on these feelings now. I try to build “mental muscle” and not automatically believe and act on them when they appear.
PATTERNS OF DESPAIR AND DISCOURAGEMENT
Patterns of despair and discouragement in my own family, and the classism, racism, violence, alcohol abuse, and generalized poverty and misery I witnessed along the Mexico-U.S. border, were disheartening and as a young person hard for me to understand. No adult took us aside and explained why things were the way they were, why people were getting hurt. RC has helped me get a handle on the early experiences.
I recall reading sociology books that referred to Mexicans as being fatalistic or defeatist in their outlook. Of course! Oppression and other hardship will do that to any people. At the same time, I’ve seen many working-class Mexicans and Chicanos/as fighting hard, not quitting, and making their lives better, both personally and collectively.
USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Latinos/as and Chicanos/as
(Present Time 208, July 2022)