I've only been in Portland for a year, and still am learning what it means to exist as a biracial Latinx person in a city quick to celebrate its whiteness. It's been challenging. I moved here bracing myself for a "white city." One of many things I've learned, is that mainstream Portland contributes to the tremendous erasure of the many black, brown, and immigrant communities that have been here, resisting for a long time. And I've felt so incredibly fortunate to be immersed in some of that during my year here.
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I grew up in Denver, Colorado surrounded comfortably by lots of people who looked like me and had experiences similar to mine, "mixed" kids, with strained but withstanding relationships to their culture. My grandmother would send me home with beans, rice, and green chili packed in old butter and cool whip containers, but I could not understand the songs she sang cooking. Spanish is my unrequited love; a beauty I will never fully behold, a hardship I will never have to bear.
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I often feel at a constant in between; racially, culturally, in gender and sexuality often too. I identify as a mixed race, queer, Latinx person. My mom is Latina, with indigenous roots in Mexico, my father is Anglo. This is a constant struggle to name, express, and hold myself accountable to. Wanting a place to belong, but not wanting to take up space that is not for me. Knowing the weight of my privileged ambiguity will always be lighter than the weight of oppression that comes with others' certainty. I have a responsibility to both honor my Latinidad and maintain awareness of the privileges that comes my whiteness.
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I have a shirt from the Portland Mercado that reads "PUENTE ENTRE CULTURAS". Portland has pushed me to reflect on bridging the bifurcated and complex aspects of myself, and within my community. As Latinx and people of color, we have important stories to tell. We deserve to reclaim spaces, with no walls, only bridges. I want to be vulnerable enough to take down my own walls of insecurity around my cultural identity, my sexual identity, my gender identity, and do the work of building and creating art, community, & tributes of resistance& resilience.