Growing up as a Chicana nerd, I never thought I’d write a book about myself, much less about Oxnard, where I grew up. This humble city on the Southern California coast was hardly the stuff worth writing about. Or so I had been taught throughout my elementary and high school years.

But then, as an adult, I began researching the late Chicana writer Michele Serros, who also grew up in Oxnard, and who deftly—defiantly even—wrote about our shared hometown in every work she authored, and I surprised myself. Discovering Serros sent me back home. I had planned to write a literary analysis of representations of Chicana adolescence throughout Southern California, using young adult novels set in San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Oxnard. I wound up penning a sort of memoir: confronting memories of pain, loss, and isolation that mirrored Serros’ own feelings of out-of-placeness in a city that has never quite welcomed Chicana misfits like us.

Mapping Oxnard’s presence in Serros’ work, and interweaving my own personal history, helped me understand what it meant to come of age in the 805 area code, and to consider Chicana adolescent identity and subjectivity.

Michele Serros’ school photos, from Rio Real Elementary in Oxnard. Courtesy of Michele Serros Collection, California State University, Channel Islands John Spoor Broome Library.

Oxnard is a curious sort of city. Known for its abundant strawberry fields and mild coastal climate, its main claim to fame these days is hosting the Dallas Cowboys’ yearly summer training camp. However, as scholar and Oxnard native Frank P. Barajas has written, places like Oxnard hold rich histories of community activism and political involvement. Oxnard was “founded” by white agribusiness settlers, but it was mainly Mexican and Japanese laborers who toiled in its sugar beet fields. While the Chicano Movement is typically associated with more famous parts of California such as Los Angeles, Oxnard too was the site of activism and political awakening throughout the 1960s.

Growing up I had heard stories of family members’ involvement with Chicano activist groups like the Brown Berets. My mother once shared that she and my grandmother sewed the hats my uncles wore with their cargo pants and white tee shirts—the preferred attire for activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But these were mere anecdotes I heard here and there. I never read anything about Oxnard’s history in my high school textbooks. I had the distinct feeling—even though it was never uttered aloud—that things like “history,” “culture,” and “literature” didn’t exist in Oxnard. Look elsewhere, my teachers implicitly said. Nothing for you here, the schools suggested. Move it along.

Michele Serros’ desk. Courtesy of California State University, Channel Islands Chicana/o Studies Department.

So perhaps it was not at all ironic that I only learned about Serros when I was working on a PhD in English, and that the discovery was purely accidental. I was researching contemporary Chicana literature; a library database search served up Serros’ most famous book, 1998’s Chicana Falsa, with its eye-catching subtitle: And Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. The collection featured gut-wrenching and funny tales of speaking Spanglish, hating high school, accusations of being a “fake” Chicana, and of course, dreaming of one day getting the hell out of Oxnard.

The discovery that such a book even existed caught me off guard and made me wonder if I’d been kept from a juicy secret that I should have known decades earlier. When I told my mother about it, she casually said, “Oh yeah, I know Michele. She’s related to la familia Serros.”

That familia Serros? As in the guys who taught my twin sister and me how to swim at La Colonia pool, minutes away from my maternal grandparents’ home?  Yep, that one. Serros’s grandparents and great-grandparents, much like my own, migrated to Oxnard in the first half of the 20th century and lived in the Mexican barrio known as La Colonia. Oxnard was relatively small, hovering at just about 40,000 residents by 1960, and most of its earliest Mexican residents would have, at one time or another, known each other.

In the first half of the 20th century, Cristina Herrera’s family, pictured, lived in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio—just like the Serros family. Courtesy of Serafina Herrera (author’s mother).

My Mamá Chonita and Papá Tomás, it turned out, had been close friends with Michele’s family. When I was in high school in the early to mid-1990s, Serros had already published Chicana Falsa. In the years that followed, she would publish other important texts, including How to Be a Chicana Role Model (in 2000) and even a young adult novel, Honey Blonde Chica (in 2006). Her works explored complex themes like identity and what it means to not readily be accepted as Chicana because of her struggles with Spanish. Like much Latinx literature, Serros embraced hybridity, even as she troubled identity terms like Chicana and Chicano. She died of cancer, at 48, in 2015. All this time, I had no idea about her family connection to mine.

When I learned about Serros’ work, I did something I’m still ashamed to admit. I tucked her books away in my shelves, occasionally reading them but choosing not to study them too closely for fear that they would dredge up unpleasant memories of Oxnard. Which they do. When Serros mentions Oxnard street names like Vineyard Avenue or landmarks like Plaza Park, I picture them clearly, a kind of familiarity that is akin to coming home. Except coming home isn’t always fun. Returning to Oxnard means having to relive the high school bullying, the invisibility, and my father’s abandonment. It means confronting pain.

Writing about one’s wounds is a tricky thing. It’s messy, even ugly. But it’s a necessary voyage, I learned as my book took shape, and Serros’ works loomed ever and ever larger. As I wrote about Chicana Falsa and her later books, I started to do so with an unabashed glimpse into my own Chicana teen years. How terrifying high school was for a quiet kid who struggled to make friends, the exact opposite of my popular older brothers, Chavita and Marcos, who everyone knew by name because they excelled in sports. Much as Serros’ poem, “The Best Years of My Life,” documents a facetious but all too real account of a Chicana teen lost in the crowd, I also was largely invisible in Oxnard High School, a place that rendered me not really Chicana. When Serros wrote, “Every day I dragged my feet in customized black and pink Vans (only thing about me the right color, right size),” she may as well have been talking about me, for no matter how you sliced it, I was never quite right in my classmates’ eyes. My classmates viewed me as the lesser kind of Brown because I was shy, awkward, and liked to read.

I attributed these painful years to living in Oxnard, a place I was desperate to flee the first chance I got—and did, taking jobs in Central California and Portland, Oregon that put Oxnard in my rearview mirror. Serros, too, yearned to escape, to live in a big city, to create art. But even as we drive away, we can’t avoid the rear view. My book taught me that. Oxnard taught me that. Michele Serros taught me that.

I live far from the city that raised me, but my hometown still resides in me. Readers may be uncomfortable with my refusal to romanticize a city I haven’t always loved, and that hasn’t always loved me in return. My family will likely struggle to understand why I have written these words, and why I chose to write them now. Call it a compulsion, an itch, a drive. Oxnard called to me, Serros called to me. This time I finally answered.

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