Am I ready to take a step towards accepting my daughters's independence? If so, then my writing is now directed at me. I think my opportunities to feed their ideas and mold them will be expressed differently, more passively. Their lives are now more in their hands than in mine. And I transition effort into accepting their choices, support their growth, and encourage an adventurous attitude. In a more significant way, I feel I am freeing them from my biases and any obligation to my value system.
They will never experience the same culture I did. They will need contemporary tools that will help them learn to be productive people in their culture. They will reflect and fall back on the wisdom every generation seems to. But not because of culture, more because of the human and innate ability to seek healing. I like to say seeking God, the Divine, the Complete, the everlasting fountain. Maybe even going as far to say as common as all organisms. Mi jitas, they will face their own social, ethnic, and interpersonal dilemmas. They may not need to call themselves Chicanas.
I don't value culture in the same ways I used to. It means something different. It isn't worth the same to me either. It is just as important as ever. It holds a different meaning for me. It is beautiful and invasive, a paradox. Culture is a facade established possibly, in a poetical way, to give the soul a face, and the ego fists. It makes me sad and endeared. I am curious what is in store for the New Mexican culture. What will my young ladies call themselves?
They will never experience the same culture I did. They will need contemporary tools that will help them learn to be productive people in their culture. They will reflect and fall back on the wisdom every generation seems to. But not because of culture, more because of the human and innate ability to seek healing. I like to say seeking God, the Divine, the Complete, the everlasting fountain. Maybe even going as far to say as common as all organisms. Mi jitas, they will face their own social, ethnic, and interpersonal dilemmas. They may not need to call themselves Chicanas.
I don't value culture in the same ways I used to. It means something different. It isn't worth the same to me either. It is just as important as ever. It holds a different meaning for me. It is beautiful and invasive, a paradox. Culture is a facade established possibly, in a poetical way, to give the soul a face, and the ego fists. It makes me sad and endeared. I am curious what is in store for the New Mexican culture. What will my young ladies call themselves?
What do I call myself?
I am a Latino, with a Chicano lifestyle, from the northern region of New Mexico. After a history of identity crises, I stand poetically looking down into a menacing canyon, with the sun in my eyes, preparing to shed all the conveniences that have come with belonging to a group of people, land, religion, foods, culture. I am practicing being real with myself, more fully human. For much of my life I have felt obligated "to be", maybe more, "to be...long". I am a collection of labels.I am changing, always, yet in some aspect solidifying. With the changes in perspective I am also writing differently. I feel ready to write about the limits, embarrassment, shame, and contradictions that come with applied culture. It feels complicated having to grow up "brown". I'll share what I feel has become generationaly irresponsible. I want to capture in idea the hardship of having clung to a community built on oppressing, and eventually having to cry out oppressed. I want to tell me, my Chicano story.
The term Chicano has so many meanings. It doesn't have a quantitative nature. It is an identity, a philosophy, a movement, a religion, and what ever the person needs it to be. It has its traditions, conservatives, haters, and abusers. Chicano in my writing will be the culture I know as the following:
Being labeled a radical American citizen having a consquistador's heritage, while believing I am seen as lower, asked to be accountable, yet perceived with less privilege, a revolutionary without country.
I was born human, nurtured like a villager, raised to be Christian, and taught to be American as translated by a bunch of New Mexicans, a bunch of Chicanos. With this I can write my story.