Even if The System Fails, I Will Still Be a Body That is Breathing.
This piece came from an self-conscious place of mine as I tend to base most of my ‘ability’ to claim the label xicana on my ability to speak Spanish. Being born and raised in the Inland Empire, however, the best your gonna get from me is a choppy half-Spanish that requires a knowledge of both English and Spanish. I wrote this poem for one of my Gender and Sexuality courses at UCR (pre-2016 election) as a submission for a zine and interactive blog comprised completely of work from queer xicanas which we dubbed Queercanas. Somehow everyone that my professor picked to be in my same group ended up being a light skin xicana just like me so we made this the focus of our content and aimed to translate what it means to be ni de aqui y ni de alla. So I challenged myself to just focus on my life, thinking about how being the lightest daughter of my mestiza mother has trapped my xicana experience in a space that was limited to others speaking Spanish to me, while I was always crippled by the fear of “sounding too white”.
I’m now in my 3rd year of studying at UCR and have finally forced myself to deal with the language requirement for graduation that I aim to use to finally defeat the awkward vibe that I get when I’m visiting home and my great grandma, who only speaks and understands Spanish asks me, “¿Por qué no te quedas para la semana?” and I struggle to explain to her the contents of my week and to find a reason that I can translate besides ‘tengo trabajo’. The classroom almost felt like a comfortable space to finally embrace my home language and challenge myself to use it for my own purpose, but I knew I was exactly the same as every other student in there; placed here based on poor exam placement results and no choice but to buckle up for the 10 weeks of cramming we were about to experience.
“The first time I heard two women say the words ‘nosotras,’ I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use ‘nosotros’ whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.” — Gloria Anzaldúa
I’ve recently been required to read a section from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera, a book centered around the being the ‘New Mestiza’ born from the borderland culture that is portrayed as a diverging concept, but which is really the converging of the two dominant cultures that is best exemplified by the language of the people. Anzaldúa’s acknowledgment of difference between ‘nosotros’ and ‘nosotras’ started an internal dialouge for me as the first time I learned what ‘nosotros’ meant was in my Spanish 1 class where I had previously assumed it wasn’t a commonly used word because I couldn’t think of a time I had heard my family speak it to me. I mean, maybe it was spoken to me, and I never understood it? Or was this yet another instance of my inherited pale skin casting me as foreigner from my own culture? Either way I was saddened by the reality I had to face that my Spanish will always be framed from the perspective of someone born in America who learned English first.
“Take this time to mourn, to strategize, to hold each other closer, to fiercely love each other and exist, to do what you have to do to get ready. You don’t owe your oppressor anything. If you can, take a deep breath. Steady yourself. Bring your friends and family close. Fight like your life depends on it, because for many of us, it does.” — @fagsagainstfascists
These words came from a classmate who wrote a piece titled On Legitimacy and What It Means for Marginalized People to Resist that uses rhetoric like the one quoted above to discredit academic based principles and the way that implies culture created outside of academia is disagreeing with dominant so therefore is also a problem. When I enrolled into my Spanish class, I knew I was going to be faced with some confusion because my existing community based knowledge of the language, but I wasn’t expecting to lose points on my exam for defining ‘high heels’ as ‘tacones,’ a word I’ve grown up saying vs the book definition of ‘zapatos de tacón’ that I just learned last week.
I didn’t accept myself as a xicanca until I got into the academic sphere and I saw just how diverse mestiza women can be, so I can appreciate the smalll advances made within academic discourse, but again using the words of Anzaldúa, “I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself until translation is no longer necessary for me to accommodate English speakers [as] I would much rather speak Spanglish.”
