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.

The post How Two Chicana Nerds Wrote Their Way Back to Oxnard appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial—the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo—dominates the landscape. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there for Texas independence and that their sacrifice will never be forgotten. The didactics urge the public to observe this history with solemnity and reverie.

Yet the story is one-sided. While there were many root causes of the Alamo siege, one of the most important was that Texas Anglos were fighting Mexican soldiers to uphold slavery. In San Antonio, as in many other cities, the histories of Latinx and Black communities are overshadowed by Anglo-dominated narratives.

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed prompted a national reckoning with commemoration. Communities began to think about what to do with controversial, often racist, statues, markers, and place names. Many wanted their landscapes to tell a different story—one that did not venerate racial violence.

The targets of these conversations have been mainly physical plaques and statues—but the resolutions are far more varied. New digital tools let scholars, students, and community members create new, and newly inclusive, forms of memorialization. Hitching historical research to new digital technologies helps tell different, more inclusive, and more nuanced narratives about the past. Malleable digital technologies can be much more creative and responsive than stone statues, soldiers in bronze, or iron plaques. In season three of “Western Edition,” the podcast we host at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, we highlight some of these innovative efforts across the West, including in San Antonio.

One of these is the digital history project Mapping the Movimiento. Created by professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio and its Special Collections Library, the project functions like a “bus tour of San Antonio civil rights locations,” history professor Omar Valerio Jiménez says. Anyone in San Antonio with a smartphone can use the interactive map.

Mapping the Movimiento’s 15 sites span the 20th century. They include Edgewood High School, an anchor for the city’s Mexican American West Side and focus of important judicial rulings about public school funding inequities, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in the late 1980s by Chicano and other activists working toward social justice in San Antonio and beyond.

Mario Cantú’s family restaurant is on the map, too. “Anybody who was anybody in the Chicano movement when they came to San Antonio met at Mario’s,” says historian Jerry Gonzalez. Known as “the first eating space in San Antonio to desegregate its food counter,” the restaurant served as a vital social hub for the city’s Mexican American community in the 1950s. Today, the restauarant building has been demolished and the land upon which it once stood is part of the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio. No physical plaque marks the space. Visitors to Mapping the Movimiento’s website can see artifacts and images from the restaurant’s heyday and learn how Cantú became a key figure in the city’s Chicano and civil rights activist communities.

Similarly, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists, an initiative of Texas A&M University–San Antonio historian Pamela Walker, uses digital mapping to commemorate the sites and experiences of Black San Antonians during the Jim Crow era. In partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum and the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation, Walker’s team of student-researchers reconstructed the histories of more than 20 locations included in the Green Books—gazetteers that mapped safe tourist destinations for Black travelers in the Jim Crow era. QR codes placed around the city connect passersby to a digital map of Black San Antonio and a richly researched essay for each featured site.

One of Walker’s students, James Thomas, researched the Carter Undertaking Company, a funeral home at 601 Center Street. Now called the Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary, the institution has been continuously operated and family-owned since 1906, and its funeral directors played a crucial role in social justice work of the mid-20th century. Black-owned businesses provided Black families with financial stability, enabling protests against Jim Crow Era abuses and helping in turn to provide safety nets for neighbors, Thomas writes. They provided for elders “who weren’t getting the proper care that they needed,” and contributed in significant ways to “build a better community on the East side for the African Americans.”

Like Mapping the Movimiento, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists includes sites that still exist and sites that have disappeared from the city. Reading the Green Books in present day offers a glimpse into the vibrant world of Black San Antonio during the era of Jim Crow, but also shows how much of it had been lost to urban renewal. For instance, student Delaney Byrom researched the former State Theater, which hosted plays and movies from 1929 to 1960 at 209 North Main, now the site of a parking lot.

Byrom spoke with patrons of the theater such as Walter Dykes, now in his 90s, who watched films there as a child—dressed up for the occasion in a tie, but still mischievously inclined toward throwing popcorn and making noise. Byrom’s grandmother, Liana Reyes, also frequented the theater as a teen. She remembers it as a segregated place, where she—a Mexican American—could sit in the front, but Black patrons had to enter through the back and sit in the balcony.

Walker hopes her project’s digital markers will be a first step to giving the stories of Black San Antonians “a permanent footprint on the landscape.” Digital memorialization initiatives are important, she says, because, when it comes to historical markers and sites, “there have been far too many communities, especially Black communities and communities of color, who haven’t been able to have a say in [creating memorials that reflect] what’s important to them.”

The landscape of memory and commemoration and race is shifting in the U.S., thanks to historians, students, activists, and community members who are reimagining it in exciting and innovative ways. Pairing grassroots historical research with emerging digital technologies democratizes: It allows communities, individuals, and institutions that have for far too long been left out of public history-making and memory to see their stories heard and respected. The questions Mapping the Movimiento and Safe Spots for Negro Motorists’ researchers grapple with—concerning race, belonging, and legitimacy—lie at the heart of a healthy American democracy, one that can link memory and reckoning.

The post In San Antonio, Remembering More Than the Alamo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In June of 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference headed north to Chicago to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement in a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods intended to take aim at the city’s deeply-entrenched residential segregation.

They marched through Gage Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Chicago’s Southwest Side, where rows of bungalow homes provided a perfect visual. The modest houses were within buying reach for many Black families, but decades-old restrictions and discriminatory practices by real estate agents barred African Americans from purchasing there. Dr. King guided his supporters with a powerful sermon that had a simple message: “My place is in the sunlight of opportunity, my place is in the comfort of the good house, my place is in Gage Park.” But the presence of the civil rights activists soon ignited a violent backlash by white Chicagoans.

At the same time as King was putting Southwest Chicago in the national spotlight, Latino Chicagoans were in the midst of their own parallel struggle for access to restricted housing and urban space. Long before King’s arrival, Mexican Americans had been prevented from purchasing homes in Gage Park and surrounding areas by housing discrimination and threats of violence. So while the violent response to King’s marches was directed at civil rights activists and the idea of integration, it also shaped Latino Chicagoans’ community-building efforts. The powerful white backlash prolonged restrictions on urban space, forcing Latino Chicagoans to anchor their residential, civic, and economic lives on the boundary lines of segregation.

The struggle for a Latino place on the Southwest Side began in the 1910s and 1920s, when thousands of Mexican immigrants poured into Chicago to work in stockyards and slaughterhouses. A Mexican enclave formed behind the Union Stock Yards, part of a larger area known as the Back of the Yards. The neighborhood was already internationally infamous, as the setting of Upton Sinclair’s jaw-dropping 1906 novel The Jungle, an exposé of the unsanitary conditions in which America’s consumer meat was produced. Its working class, predominantly Central and Eastern European residents reluctantly allowed the Latino enclave to exist, as long as it remained tightly contained within a few city blocks.

White Chicagoans often fortified neighborhood boundaries through real estate industry practices that prohibited Black Americans from buying in their neighborhoods. Racial violence also wrought terror, and Mexicans quickly learned from the white mob violence perpetrated against Black homebuyers. “We were isolated there—we dared not move out of that district,” recalled Monico C. Amador, who grew up in Back of the Yards in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, his father was shot and killed just outside the neighborhood by a white man who resented the presence of Mexicans there.

For working-class white residents between the 1920s and 1950s, the old, hard-scrabble Back of the Yards neighborhood and its packinghouse jobs served as a gateway to nicer parts of the Southwest Side. Neighborhoods like Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, West Lawn, and Marquette Park were only blocks away from the stockyards but represented—as one former resident put it—a “move away from the immigrant experience.” Their coal-heated, octagon-shaped, brick bungalow homes, sitting on identically-sized lots, provided the comfort of suburban-like sameness within the city. But everyone knew that these neighborhoods were completely off limits to anyone who possessed dark skin, spoke Spanish, or both.

In the 1950s and 1960s, years before Dr. King arrived, both Black and Latino Chicagoans began to challenge this unspoken rule, seeking to escape the overcrowded environs of their respective segregated landscapes, pushing further west and south in search of better homes. These efforts to challenge housing restrictions provoked an intense campaign by whites, parish groups, homeowner associations, and the lending industry, who banded together with real estate agents in the mid-1950s to draw a new restrictive boundary along Ashland Avenue, a major north-south thoroughfare, agreeing to keep homes west of Ashland all-white.

Like previous racial boundaries, the Ashland covenant was enforced through discrimination and violence. The Southwest Side of the 1960s simmered with white power groups, including a large chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Operation Crescent (which championed “white community control”), a youth gang called the United Patriots, the John Birch Society, and an openly segregationist Gage Park Civic Association. All these groups fed Southwest Side residents with fears about the nearby presence of Blacks and Latinos.

In 1966, when King’s Freedom Movement arrived, that fear erupted into racial mob violence. “The racists … threw rocks and bottles and cherry bombs at the marchers, carried signs advocating White Power, and chanted invectives,” historian Simon Balto writes. During one march, a thrown brick struck King himself in the head, causing him to bleed.

In August, King retreated. The Chicago Freedom Movement ended its campaign for open housing, walking away with few if any gains, and went down in history as a setback for the civil rights leader and Black Chicagoans.

Though Chicago’s Mexican and Mexican American communities were also affected by housing discrimination and racist hatred, by and large its members did not join King’s supporters in their demonstrations. Some Latino activists took to the streets throughout the 1960s, but far more Mexican Chicagoans pursued a parallel but divergent path, working within the limits of segregation restrictions to lay crucial groundwork for Latino politics and placemaking—an effort to build a social infrastructure of inclusion, familiarity, and relevance—with the hope that successful business and political power would gradually erode housing restrictions.

During the 1960s, the Mexican community built commercial, cultural, and political institutions right up to Ashland Avenue’s colorline. By the late 1960s, the avenue was home to the headquarters of both the Mexican American Democratic Organization and the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, two key organizations that would build relationships not with the civil rights movement but instead with the all-powerful Richard J. Daley machine, seeking political inclusion no matter how minor the concessions the city’s powerbrokers offered. That push for limited inclusion won out over more direct participation in the Chicago Freedom Movement—or at least over a more forceful challenge to segregation and the violence of white supremacy.

This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King. But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history. Perhaps most notably, the Latino community in Chicago helped secure the 1983 election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, whose support came from a broad, multiracial alliance for which shared housing discrimination and political neglect were key catalysts for action.

Today, Chicago’s Southwest Side is a wellspring of grassroots organizing by young progressives who challenge the current political-economic system that keeps working-class nonwhite Chicagoans struggling. These residents value Gage Park not for its exclusivity or legacy of white power, but instead for its roles in King’s active advocacy for broad structural change. And on any given day, along the area’s commercial corridors, one can hear regional Mexican music blasting from giant speakers and see Black Lives Matter signs on storefronts—a far cry from the summer of 1966, when the two communities, in spite of shared struggles, stood apart.

The post The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Here’s his story, as only a brother could tell it.

During the early 1960s, to escape the violence of a small Mexican rancho, Zajo Grande, in the beautiful state of Michoacán, our abuelo Martin Huerta Hernandez relocated most of our familia to Libertad, Tijuana, Baja California. The Huertas joined an informal settlement on a hill, the Cañón Otay. Part of an impoverished border city, the Cañón lacked clean water, paved roads, and other basic amenities. Our large Mexican familia included most of our 11 tías and tíos, along with many primas and primos. Salomón was born in Tijuana and spent his first six years there. I was born in Sacramento, California, and spent my first four years in Tijuana.

During the early 1970s, our extended familia migrated to Los Angeles. Like countless new immigrants in the U.S., my relatives pooled their resources and supported each other. We originally settled in a three-story Craftsman house in Hollywood. It had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an attic, and a basement. At any given time, about 30 adults and kids lived there.

Amidst the overcrowded living conditions, we housed pollos—a dehumanizing term used for smuggled migrants—in the locked basement. One of our tíos was the main coyote, or human smuggler. Older family members helped smuggle migrants into the U.S. for $500 per person—collecting half up front and the rest after they held the migrants for several days and then delivered them to their destinations. Our tías cooked and cleaned. Not to be left out, we kids also played a role in the informal negocio. As my tía would fondly say, “Álvaro, lleva estos frijoles y el arroz a los pollos. No olvides las tortillas.” (“Álvaro, take beans and rice to the migrants. Don’t forget the tortillas.”)

After two years in Hollywood, our immediate familia moved to the Ramona Gardens public housing project in East Los Angeles—better known as the Big Hazard projects, after the notorious gang. Without knowing, our parents moved us into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. Poverty, violence, drugs, and police abuse were omnipresent. When we moved in, Salomón was eight years old and I was six.

While attending Murchison Street Elementary, Salomón first realized his passion for art. He entered a drawing contest in sixth grade and lost to a kid named José. Just like when his bike was stolen in the projects (my fault!), Salomón was robbed. During this period, Salomón was initiated (beaten by a group of kids for 10 seconds) into the Hill Boys, where, as a wannabe tween “gangster,” he utilized his art skills to graffiti the neighborhood walls with the placasos, or nicknames, of the homeboys.

Later, he painted murals at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights and Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno. He attended Pasadena City College, where he took advanced art classes and decided to pursue a career as an artist, and transferred to the prestigious ArtCenter College of Design, on a scholarship, in the spring of 1989.

While initially intimidated, since he was one of the few brown faces on campus (excluding the kitchen workers and custodians), Salomón slowly mastered the rules of the game, embraced his identity, and graduated at the top of his class. A testament to his success at ArtCenter, his mural-size painting of homeboys from the projects, “Hanging Out” (1991), was featured in the college catalog and related materials.

ArtCenter introduced Salomón to European art masters. In 1992, my brother reimagined the Flemish Baroque painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ “The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt” (1616), transforming Arab hunters into Chicano homeboys in his large painting “Los Tres Caballeros” (“The Three Gentlemen”). The prey is no longer a hippo, but pigs—a reflection on Salomón’s experiences with police abuse, which is prevalent in brown communities, especially in impoverished and segregated places like the Big Hazard projects. The same year, Salomón painted a mural in memory of Arturo “Smokey” Jimenez—an unarmed neighborhood resident who was killed by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officer on August 3, 1991.

My brother’s career quickly took off. The Latina-owned Julie Rico Gallery in Santa Monica included him in a two-person show in 1993 and gave him a solo show in 1994. For the first, Salomón primarily painted members of our familia; for the second, he depicted homeboys and homegirls from the projects. In 1995, Salomón started the graduate program in art at UCLA—another prestigious program with very few students of color from the barrio.

During his second year at UCLA, Salomón began painting portraits of the backs of people’s heads–an artistic breakthrough that would bring him national and international acclaim. He secured his first major solo show in a mainstream gallery in 1998, at the Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica. Salomón was reimagining and redefining the meaning of portraiture, forcing us—the audience—to question the identity (or identities) of his subjects, as well as our own.

Reviewing a 2000 group show at the California Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight described the power in Salomón’s challenge to the conventions of painting. “Salomón Huerta is the only straightforward figurative painter among the 10, but his hypnotic ‘Untitled Figure’ is perhaps the most powerful, conceptually disconcerting work on view. Against an uninflected field of bright blue oil paint, a life-size standing figure of a man—head shaved, feet apart, arms at his side, clothing casual—is rendered in a manner both precise and simplified. Unlike ordinary figure paintings, the man in this one is shown from behind, so that a viewer scrutinizes his back.”

Riffs on identity suffuse Salomón’s work across genres. His minimalist, immaculate depictions of houses have the appearance of American suburban wealth—but are in fact homes of the working poor. His series of Mexican luchadores exhibited in a solo show called “Mask” at the Patrick Painter Gallery in Santa Monica in 2008 emerges from a fascination we shared as kids in Tijuana. While American kids loved Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man, we loved El Santo, Mil Máscaras, and Blue Demon, the Mexican heroes of lucha libre.

In a series of paintings featured in a 2018 solo show, “Still Lifes,” at the gallery there-there in Los Angeles, Salomón used our father’s gun as his subject, posing it with various drinks and food items: tequila, milk, water, coffee, pan dulce, butter, oranges, cacti, etc. The juxtaposition offers an unexpected take on childhood memories of a loving home. Salomón often brought drinks and food to our father’s nightstand, where our father kept his gun. On several occasions, when crossing the border as a kid, he had to hide our father’s gun in his pants to evade inspection. The gun was part of my relationship with our father, too. Once, when I was 13, our father gave it to me so I could serve as his armed back-up. A group of homeboys were stalking him to jump him (beat him up) for an early incident and misunderstanding.

Speaking of guns, did I mention that a cop pulled a gun on me when I was 16 years old for making a rolling stop in my 1967 Ford Mustang—a car my sister Catalina had gifted me?

Over the past 30 years, Salomón has established himself as one the best artists of his generation. He has exhibited his artwork at many prestigious gallery and museum exhibitions, nationally and internationally. He had a sold-out solo show, “Salomón Huerta: New Paintings,” at the Gagosian Gallery in London. He made it to the Whitney!

These are incredible accomplishments for an artist of Mexican origin who grew up in an impoverished Tijuana and a violent East Los Angeles. As the late, great Chicano historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones writes, anti-Mexicanism is integral to this nation and the bleak plight of brown people in America. Hence, it’s imperative that we recognize individuals of Mexican origin, like Salomón, who can compete against the best in the world in the fine arts and beyond.

I am two years younger than Salomón, with accomplishments of my own: success as a scholar-activist, degrees from UCLA and Berkeley, affiliation with Harvard, etc. I will always promote my brother’s groundbreaking work, without apologies. It is creative and imaginative and humanizes los de abajo, those on the bottom—from our Mexican familia to our childhood homeboys and homegirls. While they are no longer with us physically, I’m happy that our parents—Carmen Huerta Mejía and Salomón Huerta Chavez—lived to see their children succeed against great odds, proudly representing the salt of the earth.

The post My Brother, the Acclaimed Artist from the East L.A. Barrio appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The writer went on to demand that Congress make citizenship harder to obtain, so the government would be protected “against the vicious and criminal, the incompetent and the unfit.”

Sound familiar?

The Trump administration’s endless, bigoted campaign against immigrants may seem shocking. But the rhetoric accompanying that campaign, down to the metaphors comparing immigrants to small, loathsome animals, is nothing new. Much of what we hear today echoes opinions like the ones expressed in that editorial, published in the San Antonio Light, during the early years of the nation’s worst economic downturn, the Great Depression.

William Randolph Hearst’s own eugenicist views were proliferated throughout the newspaper titan’s media empire, which included the San Antonio Light. Hearst, who, as Fortune noted, owned “the biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” had a platform that reached an estimated 5 million daily and 7 million Sunday subscribers in major American cities.

In San Antonio, the Hearst editorial messages reverberated through both English- and Spanish-language media. The Light’s “vermin” editorial, along with its other anti-immigrant diatribes, were at once xenophobic and ironic, as they were published in a city that represented the crucible of Spanish-colonial culture and the U.S.’s Mexican American future. These immigration arguments, however, were far from parochial—they were regional, national, and even transnational. In turn, they made San Antonio’s print culture a case study for the nation’s immigration debates of that day—as well as our own.

While media technology was very different in the early 1930s, at least one important thing was the same then as now: News organizations were divided into camps with polarized ideas about who might be considered American. Many newspapers, including the Spanish-language outlet La Prensa, met the Hearst attacks with equally vociferous counternarratives extolling the virtues of immigrants to the United States.

In examining the 1930s back-and-forth between the news camps, something emerges that might be called “the mediated immigrant.” Unlike the real-life immigrant, composed of flesh and blood and known through personal experience, the “mediated” or “newspaper” immigrant is constructed of the themes, narratives, and rhetoric that U.S. broadsheets and tabloids offered their readers.

San Antonio was a perfect environment for cultivating this mediated immigrant. There, the arguments over immigration weren’t theoretical; the United States was in the process of kicking hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country, and Texas sat at the center of the story.

During the Great Depression, approximately 500,000 jobless Mexicans and Mexican Americans were repatriated to Mexico, courtesy of city and county governments nationwide. The formal and largely voluntary repatriation program—which required immigrants to process through local Mexican consulates—was the gentle way to go. Many people were rounded up by law enforcement and deported after a court hearing.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some who had never lived in Mexico, were forced from the United States through Texas, whose 1,254-mile frontier with Mexico is the longest of any U.S. border state. Caravans of hundreds of immigrants crossed the state as they fled with their worldly goods and farm animals packed up or tied to cars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons. Others poked their heads out of train windows, taking in the dry, dusty landscape of Texas—their last view of the U.S. home they were leaving for an uncertain future in Mexico.

It was an exodus of biblical proportions. Yet the actual story received scant news coverage in papers such as Light, whose editorial page preferred broader, bigoted denunciations.

Meanwhile, the independent English-language San Antonio Express—a powerhouse which represented the Southwest’s banking, ranching, and railroad interests and their investments in Texas’s economic, cultural, and social relationship with Mexico—focused its reporting not so much of farmworkers being removed, but of their employers, U.S. farmers and ranchers, who were suddenly left with fruit and vegetables rotting in fields, and chores undone. The Express’s editorial page campaigned against legislation being debated in Congress that for the first time would restrict Mexican immigration, arguing that Mexicans did “work native white men generally will not do.” In making this argument, the Express called Mexicans “indispensable,” even as it marked them as racially distinct.

It was left largely to La Prensa to convey the exodus’s human dimension, including the starvation and poverty that befell many when they returned to an economically paralyzed Mexico.

Under the Mexican immigrant publisher Ignacio Lozano, La Prensa had become the foremost exemplar of Spanish-language news in the country. Founded in 1913, it circulated in almost every state in the nation, and also in Mexico. Its sister publication, La Opinión, which Lozano started in Los Angeles three years before the stock market crash of 1929, is still in business today. Through his news outlets in these two major American cities founded by Spanish-speaking immigrants, Lozano would help define what it meant to be Mexican and American.

La Prensa emerged as a champion of Mexicans in the face of attacks during this period of forced migration. For instance, one U.S. official in El Paso—referred to only as one “high North American bureaucrat”—characterized the Mexican deportees as “‘lunatics,’ demented people, and prostitutes,” providing a veneer of justification for their removal. La Prensa was quick to report the Mexican consul general’s protests of the smear.

Likewise, La Prensa sprang into action when John C. Box, a congressman from East Texas and a leading proponent of closing the door to Mexican immigration, complained in the language of white nationalism about the “Mexican peon population … injuring farmers and farm life and working and middle class Americans of every group” as well as “injuring public health, burdening charities.”

Countering this image of Mexicans as weak, undesirable, and racially inferior, La Prensa quoted Texas railroad builder Col. Samuel Robertson’s homage to the Mexican role in developing Texas: “Neither the Americans of the pure white race, Englishmen, Welshman … not even the negroes could have opened these lands, infested with snakes, coyotes and vermin; no race other than the Mexican has been macerated in the hands and legs, by the strong spines of the cactus; these workers of Indian blood are forgotten heroes who have made civilization possible in the [Rio Grande] Valley.”

Through this vivid prose of the early 20th-century press, the mediated immigrant took on a form still recognizable today: In Hearst’s newspapers, Mexicans were vicious criminals who constituted vermin. On La Prensa, Mexicans were indigenous heroes who conquered vermin. For the San Antonio Express, the immigrant was a critical economic component whose existence Texas depended upon to thrive.

However they were characterized, as La Prensa assured its readers, Mexicans would remain a part of the nation. Presciently, and on its front page in a banner headline, the paper offered the most vigorous rebuttal to the anti-Mexican hysteria that fueled calls for limiting immigration from Mexico, when its columnist Rudolfo Uranga declared:

There will always be Mexicans in the United States, whether temporarily or permanently … Even though some anti-Mexicanists and xenophobes shout furiously for their removal and exclusion … they will not achieve it because it is no longer possible in our century.

Uranga wrote those words in 1929. Now almost a century old, his writing carries all the more relevance.

The post How Three Texas Newspapers Manufactured Three Competing Images of Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These are some of the questions writer and director Luis Valdez, producer Moctesuma Esparza, and film critic Claudia Puig took on at a “What It Means to Be American” event in Los Angeles.

In front of a crowded theater at the ArcLight Hollywood, Puig asked the pair how they felt about how much progress has been made in terms of the presence of Mexican-Americans and other Latino actors on-screen in sophisticated roles.

If you look back 60 or 70 years, there was a wonderful period in which Cesar Romero, Anthony Quinn, Gilbert Roland, Rita Hayworth, and many others were stars, said Esparza, who has produced dozens of films, including Selena. “They could headline movies and they were heroic, and they were attractive, and you could look at them and say, ‘God, I want to be them,’” he said. “I’d have to say we haven’t caught up to 60 years ago.”

Valdez, the writer and director of the movies La Bamba and Zoot Suit, agreed that the 1940s were a special time because the U.S. was dealing with World War II and the country couldn’t antagonize Mexico, for fear it might join the Axis. “One of the ways you do this—consciously or unconsciously—was to let these faces emerge.”

He also pointed out that the 1920s were a particularly good time for Latinos in film—Ramón Navarro came to be celebrated as a “Latin lover.” “Hispanic romantic types … were considered exotic, but not a threat,” Valdez said. “Today, Latinos are a threat to some people because of sheer numbers.“

But to Esparza, the sheer numbers of Latinos present an opportunity.

Latinos make up 17 percent of the population, and 35 percent of opening box office tickets across U.S., Esparza said. For movies like The Fast and Furious, Latinos may make up even 40 to 50 percent of the audience. “There’s a lot of money to be made when you reflect the audience,” he said.

And studio heads, Esparza and Valdez agreed, are not getting that.

“We don’t understand our history,” Valdez said. “We don’t understand America.” He pointed out that the history of the Americas has long been one of mixing— indigenous people, European colonists, African slaves.

“You never know in a Chicano family what color their kids are going to come out,” Valdez said to some laughter. “That’s reality.”

When Puig asked the two filmmakers to talk about some of the travails they’ve faced in the movie industry, Esparza was quick to say he wasn’t complaining—he got to produce 40 feature films.

“It couldn’t have been easy,” Puig said.

“What’s worth doing that isn’t challenging?” Esparza said. “The bigger question is why aren’t there another hundred producers that are Chicanos who have similar careers to mine?”

Valdez said that he has been trying to prove for years that Latino filmmakers can create art along a continuum that includes doing plays off a flatbed truck with farm workers in Cesar Chavez’s movement—which he joined in the 1960s—and box office successes that have Latino themes.

“You have to cook it very carefully,” he cautioned. “You gotta be creative, also. You have to be a storyteller. … Not just the color of the skin, but what are you saying about human beings? What’s the story?”

That prompted Puig to ask about what was so appealing about Selena and La Bamba. These were “specific Mexican-American stories, but they’re also speaking to a larger understanding, to the masses. What is about those specific stories—besides the fact that they’re about famous people—that connected so well?”

“The dream of reaching your moment in life where you fulfill what you wanted to do is exemplified by both of them,” Esparza said. “That’s a common feeling we all have.”

Both Ritchie Valens and Selena’s lives told an “archetypical story of seeking and then being thwarted that we can all identify with.”

Puig asked Esparza and Valdez what they thought about the current theater and arts scene. “What happened to the Chicano movement?” she asked. “What happened to social consciousness and art?”

Valdez, who is also a playwright, said there’s more social consciousness in theater than in movies. He praised the new Broadway musical Hamilton. “Here’s a Puerto Rican-American portraying Alexander Hamilton in a hip-hop drama,” Valdez said. “Thomas Jefferson was being played by an African-American. The Founding Fathers were played by actors of color. … I’m telling you, it’s a new day in American theater..”

He wishes Hollywood would pay attention. “Let’s get on to something new,” he said.

Can people who aren’t Latino tell Latino stories?, Puig asked.

Esparza praised the New Zealand-born Niki Caro for making McFarland, USA, which told the story of a cross-country team from a predominantly Mexican American high school in California’s San Joaquin Valley. “She did a wonderful job—she should be lauded,” Esparza said. But he added, “There is a challenge here. She mentioned at couple of screenings that she didn’t understand why the movie hadn’t been made before. Well it had gone on and been optioned by several other Latinos, but Hollywood didn’t say yes to them.”

It was only when a studio liked the story, the filmmaker, and the story’s appeal to families that they decided to go forward, he said.

“Now that they’ve made money with that, hopefully they’ll make more,” he said.

In the question and answer session, one young Latino filmmaker said that he was disappointed that the strongest critics of one of his movies were Latinos themselves—they thought that he was playing into stereotypes. But, he said, the story he was telling was what he grew up with.

Valdez said he’s had plenty of criticism from fellow Latinos. “You’re not any good if you’re not getting any criticism,” he said. “The question is, do you believe in it? Do you believe in what you’re doing?”

The post Ritchie Valens, Selena, and Filming the American Dream appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So what has the silver screen been communicating to Americans about the Mexican-American experience? Mexican-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the U.S. but only a handful of mainstream films focusing on Mexican-Americans have become household names—La Bamba, Selena, and Stand and Deliver, for instance, all of which came out in a 10-year span. But Mexican-Americans were present on-screen long before that moment and played a role in the off-screen American story for even longer. In advance of the event “How Do You Film the (Mexican) American Story?”, featuring La Bamba writer and director Luis Valdez and Selena producer Moctesuma Esparza, we asked film and art scholars: What are the most prominent and memorable on-screen moments in Hollywood history that tell us something about the experience of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the U.S.?

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Corporate advertisers treat it as the de facto Mexican Day, if not Latino Day, in this country. In 1998, the United States Post Office issued a Cinco de Mayo stamp featuring two folklórico dancers. In 2005, Congress passed a resolution making Cinco de Mayo an official national holiday to celebrate Mexican-American heritage. And it’s customary for presidents to celebrate Cinco de Mayo on the White House lawn with margaritas flowing, mariachi music playing, and dancers in brightly colored traditional costumes.

Don’t they all know that Mexican Independence Day is actually September 16?

Growing up in rural Zacatecas, Mexico, in the early 1970s, holidays and festivities were big community-building affairs. I attended fiestas with tamborazo-style band music, rodeos with churros showing off their roping and riding skills, and the religious procession honoring the town’s patron saint. What I remember most, though, was El Grito, the traditional cry of “Viva Mexico!” to commemorate Mexico’s independence from Spain on September 16. Like Christmas, the holiday is celebrated on the eve of the big day, and the day itself. But I have no memory of Cinco de Mayo, at least not before migrating to the United States.

It was in my elementary school’s bilingual education classroom in Ventura, California, that I first learned about the holiday, which had been incorporated into lesson plans and school assemblies on cultural diversity. In high schools at the time, Mexican-American students began organizing their own Cinco de Mayo celebrations to show off their cultural pride and make a public claim of belonging.

But what does Cinco de Mayo commemorate originally? It is indeed a holiday in Mexico, to be clear, but a lesser holiday not associated with any particular form of revelry. It is the anniversary of the famous battle of Puebla, in which Mexican liberal forces defeated an occupying French army and its Mexican conservative allies during one of Mexico’s serial 19th-century civil wars. By helping to impose an unemployed Hapsburg prince as Mexican emperor, the French were hoping to gain a new beachhead in the Americas while the U.S. was distracted with its own epic civil war.

There are a number of competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories as to why this, of all Mexican holidays, was the one to stand out on this side of the border, in the face of ostensibly stronger contenders. One theory is that it would have been awkward for Mexicans in the U.S. to be too eager to celebrate the official independence day of another country. The generations of Mexican immigrants who came to America weren’t necessarily on best terms with the authoritarian Mexican governments of yesteryear, and weren’t keen to celebrate as if they were those governments’ blind followers. Better to select a different one: Cinco de Mayo.

There is an additional, more prosaic, explanation for Cinco de Mayo’s stature on this side of the border—and that is the fact that it is a more convenient time for migrant farmworkers to celebrate, as was driven home to me when I did doctoral research on the holiday’s popularity—going strong since 1923—in Corona, California.

The Southern California town once known as the “Lemon Capital of the World” was one of the earliest to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the U.S. Mexican workers made up the majority of the labor force working in the 2,000 acres of lemon groves, 11 packinghouses, and lemon processing plant in 1930s Corona. Lemons were grown in winter months but harvested in springtime, just in time for Cinco de Mayo. The timing of the lemon harvest made Cinco de Mayo a well timed holiday, when people would welcome a reason to rest and celebrate and have a little more disposable income than usual, not to mention ideal weather. When May 5 fell on a weekday, employers paid workers early, and students were dismissed from class early to attend the festivities. As early as 1939, the Los Angeles Times reported, “All work in the citrus industry was suspended for the Cinco de Mayo holiday and several thousand persons came to participate in the celebration.”

Corona is typical of other agricultural communities in California that rely on Mexican farm labor during harvest time, where Cinco de Mayo became an entrenched holiday both because of what it represented and when it fell on the calendar. For example, La Habra’s Spring Citrus Fair incorporates a full day of Cinco de Mayo activities, and thousands attend the Fallbrook Avocado festival during harvest season to sample delicious guacamole and attend Cinco de Mayo festivities.

Corona’s Cinco de Mayo celebration—which continues to this day—has long sought to keep its events local, intimate, and inclusive. The morning parade still features local heroes and role models as grand marshals—for instance, the mother of a World War II hero killed in action or a Latina superior court judge—rather than outside celebrities. The town limits sponsors to local businesses and nonprofit organizations, continuing the spirit of the late 1940s, when the holiday was used to raise money to finance the first youth community center that later became the Corona Boys and Girls Club, which provided recreation programs for kids and teenagers. Proceeds from the celebration provide college scholarships to local Latino high school students. The crowning of the Cinco de Mayo Queen is not simply a beauty contest, but a way to encourage young Latinas to gain public speaking skills, gain confidence, and take on a leadership role in their communities. When organizers had trouble raising funds during the recent recession, the city stepped in to make it an official civic event—fully incorporating the Mexican holiday into American public life.

There is no beer or alcohol sponsorship of Corona’s Cinco de Mayo, even though you can’t talk about the popularity of the holiday everywhere else without talking about the other Corona. The corporate marketplace started pushing Cinco de Mayo as a day-long happy hour when we’re all supposed to down cervezas and margaritas when it recognized the demographic growth of the Latino population in the 1980s. Corporations thought that advertising, sponsorship, and promotion of Cinco de Mayo events would enable them to tap into that young consumer market. Beer and alcohol companies led the charge by spending millions on marketing the holiday. Corona Extra (the beer—no relation to the town) alone spent $91 million in 2013, according to Kantar Media, advertising around the holiday in both Spanish and English, calling itself “the original party beer of Cinco de Mayo.”

I don’t think that means there were kegs on the battlefield in Puebla, but it’s an amusing image. So go have a drink on Cinco de Mayo. But when you do, take a moment to reflect on the evolution of this holiday that commemorates the Americanization of a Mexican diaspora eager to assert its own identity—and, increasingly, the Mexicanization of mainstream U.S. culture as well. ¡Salud!

The post When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Cinco de Mayo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Of course the chimichanga was invented in Tucson!” yelled one Tucsonan.

“No way,” replied the Phoenix native. “I am positive it’s from south Phoenix.”

“Perhaps it’s from Mexico?” chimed in an ever-neutral Illinois transplant in the front passenger seat.

I sat behind the driver’s wheel lost in thought, stumped by our chimichanga standoff. What is essentially a fried burrito was a staple of the restaurants I grew up with in Tucson. If not listed as a direct menu item, you could always request that your “bean and cheese” or “carne asada” be deep-fried. I had always assumed that, like tacos, enchiladas, or any other heralded tortilla-based platter, the chimichanga came from south of the border. However, my fellow Tucsonan adamantly claimed otherwise: The chimichanga was an American creation, boasting the best of both nations—the eclectic fixings and convenient shape of the Mexican burrito and the deep-fried exterior of American comfort foods. In her telling, the chimichanga was our state’s answer to Tex-Mex and New Mexican cuisine next door—another example of borderlands fusion.

The more I contemplated the chimichanga, the more it came to symbolize my home city. First a Spanish missionary outpost and later an outright Mexican town, Tucson has never forgotten its Hispanic core. Spanish words are found in street names, billboards, and food menus across the city. Tucson is even home to the longest-running mariachi festival outside of Mexico. From the outside, the fried burrito that is Tucson has the appearance of many other southwest American cities; however, its insides are more Mexican than most.

Even though I grew up in a thoroughly “gringo” household, I, like all the Tucsonans I know, feel a deep kinship with America’s southern neighbor. As long as I can remember, chips and salsa were the de facto snack at our place; Mexican food was the only cuisine that all family members would agree to eat. It was no coincidence that, in a family of runners, our favorite annual bonding event was the Tucson Cinco de Mayo 10K road race, which boasts an all-you-can-eat spread of five different burritos at the finish line. And so, the thought of the chimichanga being a Tucson original, a testament to the genius of the American culinary melting pot, was exciting. I set out to investigate.

Being a tech-savvy and lazy millennial, I started, naturally, with Wikipedia. The first line of the webpage regarding the history of the food mirrored the argument from my car: “Debate over the origins of the chimichanga is ongoing.” My heart sank. Numerous Mexican and Mexican-American grandparents were trying to take credit for the original recipe. One section asserted that the chimichanga was invented in Phoenix in 1946, following a cooking experiment by Woody Johnson, founder of the still-thriving Macayo’s restaurants.

The chimichanga at El Charro Café

Multiple other sources attributed the origin of the chimichanga to Tucson’s El Charro Café, the nation’s oldest Mexican restaurant in operation by the same family. As the El Charro nativity tale goes, the chimichanga and its curious name were born shortly after Monica Flin opened the restaurant in 1922. One afternoon, Tia Monica was frying taco shells and accidentally knocked a nearby burrito into the hot oil. When the burning liquid splashed onto her body, Tia Monica let out a common Spanish expletive that she barely managed to censor in the presence of her nephews to “Chi … michanga.” (Think back to when your mother would burn her hand on the stove and yell “Fuuuuu … dge!”) One accidentally crisped burrito and one cleverly curtailed cuss word later, the chimichanga became a new favorite in Tia Monica’s culinary arsenal.

I decided to do some sleuthing of my own on a trip to visit my family in Tucson. I dragged my parents and sister into the heart of south Tucson to visit one of the city’s star Mexican establishments: Mi Nidito. On its walls, Mi Nidito proudly displays signed photographs of visits from President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and celebrities like William Shatner, Linda Ronstadt, and Enrique Iglesias. Sadly, the Saturday night we went out, Mi Nidito’s wait line wrapped around the block. With our stomachs grumbling, we settled for dinner at a lesser-known but nonetheless stellar establishment down the street, Los Portales. After a bountiful dinner with many rounds of chips and margaritas, I spoke to the restaurant’s night manager, Celia Gongora, who was born and raised in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Regarding the legacy of the fried burrito, she said that chimichangas are undoubtedly from Mexico.

“I grew up eating chimichangas as a young girl in Sonora,” she recalled. “The chimichangas in Mexico are smaller than the ones here, but they have definitely been around longer.”

Later conversations I had with other Mexico natives backed up the manager’s assertion, but the claims seemed more emotional than evidence-based.

“There is no way any American could create something as tasty as the chimichanga,” one Mexican friend stated, as if to end the discussion.

Confused and desperate for an authoritative opinion on at least the national ancestry of chimichangas, I called the Mexican consulate in Tucson. I spoke with a Mexican diplomat, Jonathan Granados Muñoz, whose job presumably entails more than fielding random phone queries from Anglo Mexicophiles. When I asked him about the food’s origin, he responded rather diplomatically, “I think it is a Mexican-American fusion dish.” He continued to explain that, while he thought the first chimichanga probably came from northern Mexico, he believed that the dish had risen to fame through its American variants.

So even Mexican diplomats posted in Arizona were willing to concede that, though the dish likely originated in Mexico, it was the U.S. that had most vocally adopted the food as its own, in a fashion not unlike America’s enthusiastic embrace of the Cinco de Mayo holiday. Regardless of its original Mexican sourcing, the chimichanga has become emblematic of the blending of cultural traditions that marks American food as a distinctly fusion cuisine.

And if “El Norte” seems most enthusiastic about claiming parentage of the chimichanga, no city wants to be more associated with it than Tucson. The city’s tourism office even went as far as publishing an ad in the nationally circulated Food & Wine magazine, inviting Americans to visit Tucson, “home of the chimichanga.”

I ended my exhausted pursuit of chimichanga truth with a pilgrimage to the food’s most likely birthplace: the El Charro Café in downtown Tucson. Relishing the sharp crunch of my knife slicing through the burrito’s crispy outer shell, I quickly forgot about its contested origins. The most important thing in that moment was that the chimichanga existed, and that it would soon find a new home—inside my stomach.

The post Who Invented the Chimichanga? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At Hmong New Year, these young musicians will perform traditional songs on the qeej, the music coming into harmony with the jangly rhythm of the coins dangling from their vests.

The qeej is significant to the Hmong community; it binds people to each other and to their culture. It’s also one of dozens of practices, places, events, groups, and people included in the Merced Cultural Asset Map, which was created last year by the Alliance for California Traditional Arts in collaboration with The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative. Our goal was to engage Mercedians in reflecting upon their own cultural assets (what we refer to as “cultural treasures”) and stimulate sharing and dialogues. Ultimately, we wanted to strengthen the relationships necessary to tackle some of the most critical community issues like reducing violence in neighborhoods or keeping kids in schools.

And these are real issues that need to be dealt with in Merced. But it was also important to us to show that Merced is more than just its issues. Merced is more than the daily newspaper and TV stories focusing on gang violence, unemployment, poverty, and conflict among its diverse communities.

To help us identify cultural treasures, we brought together a core group of eight local community members with Hmong, Mexican, Caucasian, and African-American backgrounds. This task force met every two weeks at the United Way offices in downtown Merced during the summer and fall of 2013. Since the gatherings began at 6 p.m., we thought it would be hospitable to have dinner for people. We knew food could provide a way into conversations about local culture and the different ways in which people practice and value traditions.

We ended up inviting well-respected cooks identified by the task force members to prepare meals for our meetings. It was a treat: We had meals from different parts of Mexico, Laos, and an unforgettable African-American soul food feast that included baked beans, collard greens, fried chicken, and banana pudding. The meals opened up a conversation about other cultural traditions, as well as deeper discussions about Merced’s cultural landscape. Once we had people talking, we found that our role as facilitators was to listen and create a space for others to talk to each other.

We asked members of our task force to collect surveys designed to identify cultural treasures from across south Merced County. They attended municipal events, went door-to-door in their neighborhoods, and interviewed people they believed were significant to their community.

After we compiled the more than 100 surveys, the group had the difficult task to choose only four cultural treasures to highlight in short films. In addition to the qeej, the list included the Mexican folk dance ensemble Grupo Folklórico Juan Colorado at Planada Elementary School, the highly admired soul songstress Cheryl Lockett, and the South Pacific Dance Company.

It was a privilege to follow up with these community treasures, visiting them for a conversation and to produce short film vignettes. Each visit showed me how highly invested these people are in the larger Merced community. For instance, the director of the South Pacific Dance Company, which specializes in Tahitian and Polynesian dances, brought Hawaiian culture to the Merced area in 1974 and developed a school and a well-known dance competition and festival entitled, Kiki Raina Tahiti Fête. Rebecca Ka’awela Manandic, endearingly known as “Auntie Becky,” has spent years training a diverse group of dancers of all cultural and social backgrounds at her studio in central Merced. During the holidays she organizes a series of performances in senior centers to teach her young students to recognize the value of elders and to encourage interaction between the generations.

We’re proud of the breadth of experiences captured by the Merced Cultural Asset Map. You can see that Merced is vibrant. It has theater shows; culturally deep rituals mediated by Hmong shamans; diverse food choices that include chia lemonade, seafood gumbo, and Oaxacan tamales; and important cultural organizations such as the Central Valley chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society.

The task force also dug deep into their communities to find artisans that do much of their work at home, such as Ye Her, a Hmong elder who does paj ntaub (“flower cloth”), which is a reverse applique technique that requires a high level of hand sewing skill to layer fabric that is cut and sewn using hiddens seams to form intricate patterns used on traditional clothing, wall hangings and other items. Teresa Ceja is also listed as a cultural treasure for her skills in knitting, cross-stitch, embroidery, and Mexican deshilado (open embroidery) that involves cutting threads and taking them out of a weave of cloth to create lace-like patterns within the material.

Once we identified and mapped these treasures, we wanted to share what we found so we organized an event in January at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center. The event awakened all of your senses. As soon as you entered the space, smells of flowers and food lured you in. The crochet work of Doris Caldwell invited inquiries, the performances of the Hmong dance group Ntxhais Ntxim Hlub (“Cute Little Girls”), and the Gospel singers Janisha McMillan and Todd Marion Jr., truly lifted spirits.

The best part was how the performers, cooks, and artisans engaged with each other and the older and younger generations interacted in such convivial manners. The dancers from Grupo Juan Colorado and Ntxhais Ntxim Hlub enthusiastically watched each other’s moves and together they cheered on praise dancer Jessica Daniels, who choreographed jazz and modern dance movements as homage to her spiritual belief.

In addition to the performances, we scheduled workshops in Polynesian dance, as well as storytelling and verbal practices in the Hmong and African-American communities. A Gospel class, led by one our own task force member Jerome Rasberry, ended up transforming into a lively cross-generational discussion of music, race, and cultural beliefs in Merced.

People lingered to talk long after the last workshop was over; there was a sense of warmth and togetherness, and people weren’t quite ready to leave. Loretta Spence, another task force member, articulated what so many of us were feeling: The project showed off Merced’s talents, and made people feel good about themselves and their community. Many asked about when this event would happen next and how they could contribute and participate.

It was also a reminder that we don’t take enough time, nor create the special kinds of spaces where we can learn about and appreciate each other.

The post Where You Can Find Hmong Shamans, Oaxacan Tamales, and the Blues appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.