Primary Change Agents: Profile

Monze, 19 Westminster/Huntington Beach resident age 12–19 | Sara, 19 Huntington Beach resident age 17–19

I will never forget the calculating look of contempt Monze wore every time we had a substitute teacher in high school. Only we knew about the contempt, though, to anyone else, it would have appeared that she misplaced her glasses and was clenching her teeth and squinting her eyes to read something across the room. She always wore glasses.

“Monchi?”

“Monsee?”

“Monz-ee?”

It was a cycle. She would pronounce it correctly for them. “It’s a shortening of the name Monzerrat. Mon-ze” She was patient with explaining, but of course, they only figured it out a good 45% of the time. Truthfully, even most of our peers stuck with a simple Mon-zay. Faculty would usually reach this point of familiarity with her name in their mouth like a new, strange flavor they tried every day during roll call.

Monze harbored a general disdain for the people she passed in the halls. She’s built like a runway model, statuesque and spindly, and holds the same fierce expression of neutrality. She’s selective about friends because every white girl she befriended at Marina somehow ended up doing something terrible during their friendship. She considered it a little bit more reasonable to find a fringe group of ethnic minority students, a common experience to build off of initially as she forged friendships. No matter her preferences, she found people approaching her anyway.

To some degree, she is white-passing, and her fair skin had people guessing she was white or French. Being approached by people asking about your heritage is usually an uncomfortable interaction, but it’s one that both multiracial and ethnically ambiguous people experience all the same. Monze recalls being shot down when answering a question about whether or not she was white by a white girl. It left her furrowing her eyebrows and brushing off whatever invalidating feelings were left on her cardigan, where Monze’s assertion of her identity was not particularly enough for this white girl to believe that she was Mexican. It was one of many similar factors that contributed to her practice of overcompensating to assert her heritage more clearly. For identity affirmation AND to avoid the “What are you?” question as much as she possibly could. Monze even ran into this ambiguity problem within her community, finding that other Mexican students would assume she was white (or what’s known as ‘spicy white’ which is Italian, French, Spaniard, etc.) as well, which was even further reason to overcompensate by making the effort to frequently use Spanglish, or joining and eventually running cultural clubs to assert her heritage.

The cultural expressions from the Folklorico club were received generally well because Monze marketed it as educational about culture. Many wanted to learn, and she had a promising recruitment process for performances and club meetings. White students, however, thought that the Folklorico performances were a fun little novelty. Laughing and pointing during carefully rehearsed dance recitals were not a surprise. But all it did was drive away anyone who held an intrest in joining.

The overwhelming disdain from our white peers drove Monze to start tuning out the white students when going to school. Not a particularly constructive method of coping, but there’s only so much ignorance and cold-shouldering you can take when looking to make friends in high school. Instead, she was looking for personal style and expressed that non-white is a bonus feature because of the social context.

One interesting phenomenon is the simultaneous assimilation and degradation of black culture in the Hispanic and Mexican communities, particularly in Huntington Beach. It was strange to think that at a lot of points in my high school career, acts of overt racism such as slurs, offensive questions, and things of that nature were perpetrated by Mexican and Hispanic students there. The only time I ever heard the N-word in conversation or said it around me openly was with an old friend of Monze’s at the time, a Hispanic boy in our grade who had thrown it in casually as if it was a type of sentence enhancer. The group we were sitting with was composed of either queer or ethnic students, who understood the weight of a slur, especially in front of the only black person in the 400-foot radius of that hallway. He was met with instant berating from his peers and I was honestly too embarrassed to say anything in the moment.

Later, the student who would (inevitably) ask for the N-word pass for joining the Black Student Association also happened to be a Hispanic student who was egged on by his friends to go up and ask. Again, at that moment my body felt the heat of embarrassment and I could only shoot back with a weak “If you join, you’ll learn why that’s a shitty thing to say to someone” as Monze and our good friend Ivy shot out from behind the popup table, and began cursing him out.

We look back on that as ‘the incident’ now. I always initially recoil whenever that moment replays in my head. I totally could have done something more severe. But it makes me think about how Monze’s club, her confidence, and most vital, her support, made my Black Student Association possible. I took the chance to assert myself, tired of my community being degraded and pushed aside because she made change look easy.

“It is changing, it’s not the same. By saying that it’s still the same, it’s sweeping everyone who doesn’t adhere to that mindset, mentality, and way of life under the rug.”

Sara is open and excited about new experiences, events, and people. She’s the most outgoing person I think I’ve ever met but what makes her so enticing is her genuine demeanor. Not only is her kindness so enticing, but her energy. Of course, her aura and vibe are impeccable, but I am referring to her actual vitality. She’s explosive, like a firework blooming across the sky. If she wanted to, she could put ‘professional hype-man’ on her resume.

But I think that one thing that attributed to how she came to see, and react, to the new city she landed in. And how she influenced those who were already here. Las Vegas to San Diego to Huntington Beach is the migration path Sara took with her family. Of all the interviews, hers was the most impartial. Of course, she is the newest resident out of the group. But her takeaway is broader, more sage-like.

“I need to get out of California.”

Her arrival timing could have not been more insane. She moved in for the 2020–2021 academic year, cultivating a connection with the empty boxes with name tags that were stand-ins for her peers. The highest point of a political charge was coursing through the air. Outside the window were fleets of the signature Huntington Beach mobile, giant four-door trucks toting Trump Flags. 7 or 8 miles down Beach Boulevard, masses gathered to protest for or against the inherent value of brown and black lives.

In the early years of its establishment, Huntington Beach was home to a large Japanese population. Just on the edge of the Bolsa Chica wetlands stood the Japanese Presbyterian Church of Wintersburg. The community flourished alongside the city from 1910 until the early years of the Second World War. After forced removal during wartime, the community dwindled and the demographic changed. Sara’s mother is a Japanese immigrant and works tirelessly to provide for her daughter and son. It makes me think about the way people treat her. Who got here first? And even so. What gives people the right to stop them from calling this place home?

“Me and my mom are outliers… It’s not very common, to be honest, to see a struggling Japanese family. [40:00 M]”

I would always ask her: “Dude why did you willingly choose to go to Marina?” Every time she answered genuinely.

“It was the only school in the district that had Japanese as a language elective!” Sara came to Marina because of the class selection, specifically the Japanese language class to reconnect with her heritage. Funny enough, the Wintersburg Church is still standing on the edge of the Bolsa Chica Wetland. What’s left of the Japanese culture resided in that classroom and the few families in the area who landed in a time capsule of coastal Japanese life. Unfortunately, Wintersburg is one of those concepts you have to look for yourself, deep in the genealogy section of the public library. The new community she was faced with was an environment she didn’t take to. And the atmosphere was heavily suggesting that it was not taking to her either.

“You’d hear people being very fucking racist in the halls… especially US History class? Dude.” She knows that whatever is being spewed is representative of their parents’ ideas. A school is the musty, sticky epicenter of all the things young people’s parents say behind closed doors. And the parents in Huntington Beach were not particularly discreet anyways about their prejudice.

Politics just so sewn into the school [15:55–16:39], “[The school] is a representation of the community”

Sara was going to have to find a place for herself. A fringe group, if you will. I met Sara when she joined the Black Student Association, which, of course, I was the President. And only black members. We made her feel very welcome, anyhow. Her choice to join the BSA was not rooted only in exploration, but also as an act of both acknowledgment and solidarity. There wasn’t much uplift for students of color, she noticed and even saw how invisible the BSA was on campus. “I wanted to see what I could learn.”

Sara was a core member of the BSA during our senior year. Kept the mic hot during poetry slams, ran the tea and coffee stations during slams too, and even offered to drive some of our members for a San Diego field trip. So she was well aware of all the problems we encountered just by participating in club fairs.

“[The Black Student Association] is not a social experiment… but observing how the student body reacted to it, I could tell they felt more comfortable at the school to blatantly disrespect us and our community”

Sara’s journey serves as a testament to her resilience and inner glow in the face of adversity. Student-led initiatives like the Black Student Association created the space where my most meaningful friendships were fostered. It was strange to be talked about like we were terrorizing the school just because we had put posters up advertising our events. But her excitement to join us for poetry slams negated the pit in my stomach that formed every time a new BSA poster was vandalized.