I was born in Washington state. My mom is white and met my dad in his pueblo in Nayarit, Mexico in the late 70s. She was a waitress who made friends with a woman surfer who had a dual life in the US and Nayarit. After a very sweet fling, some time passed and my dad eventually crossed the border to pick fruit and find my mom. They conceived me, then broke up. He came back into our life when I was 6, and was there until they divorced when I was 15. They had two kids – me, who came out white, and my brother, who is brown. We lived in the Renton Highlands until I was 11, then abruptly moved from that very diverse community to a very white town in rural Oregon. Alcoholism and the resulting instability in my family contributed to me dropping out of high school in Astoria Oregon at 15, and though I am inexplicably successful now, it took me a long time to sort through how intersectionality and family shape us. I’m still sorting, every day, every minute.
I was immersed in my Mexicanidad from 6 onward. We traveled to Mexico most often by driving all the way down and back, and for a while, we tried to live in our pueblo until we ran out of money. Los Chacónes are campesinos – platano tenders, mango and coco vendors, nopale peelers and incredible fisherfolk. I learned to speak Spanish from a young age but not to read and write it, and culturally I would say I belong to both worlds, but hold white privilege that has entitled me from a young age.
We were always low SES, and always confronted with racism against my dad in the Pacific Northwest. He was pulled over about once a week on his commute home near Astoria for no reason. He was a skilled cook at a nice hotel, but everyone assumed he was a cannery worker – a tough and admirable job, but not his – and yelled slowly when they spoke to him as if he couldn’t speak English. As a kid, because we have such different skin tones, I learned to immediately tell vendors that “my dad and I are here to for x,y,z”. I learned to code switch and would act white with white folks (and shrink under incidental racist comments), and act more like myself with other Latinxs (while being gently teased for being a white Chicano), but of course, always felt like I didn’t really belong in either. It’s an old story that many of us share.
Taking Spanish in college (I got my GED at 21), and immersing myself in Chicanx/Latinx studies at PSU were so important to me, and helped me to see that an intersectional ethnic identity can be embraced, and that we Mestizos (I am also a quarter indigenous Mexican) need to embrace who we are and be vocal and proud and vulnerable about our experiences.
That embrace becomes thorny in Portland. Every day I am confronted with the hypocrisy of a city that loves ethnic food, but only if there is a visible white chef making it “authentic” and a Brown back of house making all the rest happen. I see neighborhoods changing and the segregation of Latinxs increasing. I see many young first and second gen Brown folks struggling for purchase in a school system that sets them up for failure in quietly segregated schools, and I am honored to work alongside them as much as I can as an educator, all the while feeling intense embarrassment around my white privilege and struggling to find ways to create belonging and inclusion in a white normative academic climate. We shouldn’t need to persist and show grit to end up in the same place as white kids of the same socioeconomic status.
It is my goal to create a strong pipeline for Latinx kids to enter academia and science in Portland and beyond. In particular, I want to compel the Institution of academia to assimilate to our culture and perspectives, and to stop the systematic erasure of Latinx viewpoints and culture, as we enter higher education. We are not other. This is nuestra tierra.