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• 1 2017-08-10T16:47:19-07:00 Juanas and the Chicano Movement 27 plain 2017-08-10T19:18:19-07:00 A Juana is a Mexican word for a woman soldier.   Cervesas: Beers.   Maldiciones: Curses.
  
  The golden ticket to access to the Chicano movement: learn how to shout, swear and how to drink beer. Chicanas become superior logisticians, managing the working parts of the movement, writing the grants to keep the clinic doors open, organize the conferences, marches, meetings—buy enough toilet paper for the conference bathrooms.
  
  Chicanos, create the ideology—a curious mescla manufactured from ten thousand years of cultured brew carefully steeped by the golden sun of a bronze nation, not so carefully mingled with the romantic lure of enlightened history.
  
  Through two poetic works, the first authored by Colorado activist, Rudolfo Corky Gonzales, Yo Soy Joaquin, and the second by poet Alurista, El Plan Spiritual de Aztlán, the Chicano ideology of Aztlán, develops during the late 1960’s as a political response to a century of Mexican American assimilation and cultural dissolution caused by the acquisition of Northern Mexico by the United States through the 1848 Treaty of Hidalgo. Aztlán is a Nahuatl word that describes the northern portion of Mexico, most of the Southwest United States, annexed in the Treaty. 
  
  
  In 1967, Colorado activist Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales penned, Yo Soy Joaquin, a poem that would become the canon of Chicano identity. Gonzales’ Joaquin, a young mythological character, a Chicano everyman that has the sangre cosmica, cosmic blood of a thousand year history, coursing through his bronze veins. Joaquin’s story signals the clarion call of a new race whose destiny is awareness, identity and pride, to overcome racial oppression through revolution.
  
  
  In 1969 at the Denver Youth Conference, a young poet whose actual name was Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia, but was known by the name, Alurista presented a work that would become the second of the two works at the core of Chicano identity. El Plan Spiritual de Aztlán, offered young Chicanos at the conference a connection to the past of bronze indigeneity; to the spiritually nativist culture and created an ancestral tether to a geographic Mexico that no longer existed. 
  
  To the 1960’s Mexicans of the Southwest, the idea of Aztlán as an actual place becomes an opportunity to reclaim a homeland and culture, symbolically even if not the actual place. In the process of creating this nation of Aztlán, the word Chicano is also reclaimed to identify the people of this nation. Formerly a derogatory word used to describe laboring Mexicans, Chicano becomes a word associated with nation-pride and cultural identity.
  
  Feminist Socialist scholar Yolanda Alaniz describes these poetic declarations of nationhood as well-meaning and beautiful, but clearly lacking any real agenda for an attainable goal of nationhood. One of the many issues facing the establishment of a Chicano nation was that a single Chicano identity could never exist—or at least be agreed upon in the approximately dozen states that had Mexicans that identified as Chicano. 
  
  Chicano nationhood and identity relied on an ideology that was based upon a single, homogenous race or nation—two words that do not have the same meaning. As Alaniz explains, there is a distinct difference between “race” and “nation” and neither is can be characterized by a single cultural identity. 
  
  
  The other issue with Chicano ideology--where are the woman in this race and nation building? 
   
• 1 2017-08-11T22:04:33-07:00 Soy Chicana 9 plain 2017-09-21T13:50:31-07:00

  Soy Chicana

  I will not be your Spanish senorita
  I will not be your liberated mod
  I will not curse my ‘buela for her role
  I will not be your swingin’ ethnic broad
  Nor your echo of cathedral’s purity
  Nor your treasure of erotic sensitivity
  Nor anything that you would have me be—
  Nor anything at all that is not me.
  Carmen Tafolla (1975)
  
  I remember the first time someone asked me if I knew any swear words in Spanish. It was eighth grade and one of my white classmates found out I was Mexican and fluent in two languages. A boy who had never said a word to me now in my face asking me swear words and threatening to beat me up if I didn’t teach him how to swear in Spanish.
  
  I didn’t know any swear words. In my house people didn’t swear. In my house, snide comments with deep hidden meanings were the closest thing to a public display of anger or frustration. When anyone yelled or swore, it was in English.
  
  I was a failure to my classmate at an age where failing meant social rejection—as if I ever had a chance in that boy’s very wealthy circle of friends. He was not only disappointed, he made it a point to remind the rest of the class how useless I was even suggesting I wasn’t actually bilingual since I didn’t know how to swear. It was only when another young man, an African American male who would eventually become my first boyfriend came to my rescue by telling that boy to shut the hell up—in English. Michael was bigger than George. George left me alone after that. 
  
  Michael called me pretty—I had no idea that I could be anything but brown and a Mexican poser. I was unaware of the power of Latina sexuality—it didn’t learn this at home from my very beautiful mother and her very beautiful family. As a poser, I wasn’t Mexican enough so I couldn’t possibly be pretty. Michael could never convince me of this.
  
  Latinas are beautiful and smart, quick witted and keenly instinctual about sex—the assumption is everyone wants them, and will get them because Latinas are easy. Wasn’t Rita Moreno sleeping with George Chakiris in West Side Story?  Wasn’t Ava Gardner in the Barefoot Contessa sleeping with every gigolo on both sides of the Atlantic and doesn’t her promiscuity lead to her tragic end? Wasn’t Isabella sleeping with Columbus and wasn’t he banished by her husband, Ferdinand to go and find the end of the world—or at least Hispanola?
  
  Chicanas can be sexual beings, having the exotic, bewitching and beguiling as tools in a well-stocked arsenal of seductive power. Chicanas can know their own mind, live their own dream or at least find ways to negotiate with themselves and the world, ways to make things happen. What Chicanas won’t do, is lived oppressed within their own homes—I want to believe that but I know it isn’t always true.
  
  My grandmother once told my mother, “marriage is a trap” which was why Lupe never taught Rhea to cook or clean house. My grandmother adored my grandfather, but she also knew her place in the home was her place in the culture. In Mexico and as a single woman, Lupe had run her mother’s businesses in the marketplace—in the US, Lupe had to wait for her husband, Ponciano to be ready to make big decisions about their personal finances. It was Lupe that encouraged him to buy land, buy buildings, develop a portfolio with assets—it was Ponciano that always took the credit.  Rhea had to unlearn the lessons of obedience and subservience as she was taught from the culture of colonizer to then learn the definition of Chicana feminist independence that poet Carmen Tafolla offers in the last line of her work, Soy Chicana, “Nor anything at all that is not me.”
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