Adriana Garcia: La Patriota of San José
Adriana Garcia, also known as Nana and La Patriota, is an activist and community builder in San José. She is a founding member of MAIZ San José, which aims to use cultural advocacy in order to increase political participation of the local Mexican community, specifically among women, LGBTQQI peoples, and youth. She is currently involved in many local and national organizations such as Peace and Dignity Journeys, the Santa Clara County Wage Theft Coalition, the Progressive Womxn of Color Contingent, the South Bay International Womyn’s Day Network, and the San José May First Coalition.
Describe your own social justice journey and how you first started learning about your identity and political issues impacting you.
I first learned about gender politics at home. [I wondered,] “Why does my brother don’t have to do shit?” He didn’t have to do a lot of domestic work, and I did. He got to go outside, and I didn’t.
I, then, got politicized in crossing the border. I was born here but I moved to Mexico when I was two. I came back when I was five. The first memories of who I am, my identity, was Mexican. I was Spanish speaking and by then, I had already gone through kindergarten, pre-school, and first grade. I was already institutionalized by the Mexican educational system which [focused on] arts and crafts. By then, I was doing whatever art possible. I was doing music and theatre on top of growing up in a rural setting. Moving back, it was like a culture shock. It was like, damn. [People told me,] “You’re actually El Norte. You’re actually a citizen and we’re going back.” I was crushed and I was five.
There was those two dynamics. I [also] got politicized through educational justice. I went from JW Fair Middle School and I was tracked into ESL classes, realizing that I was in classes with teachers with the white savior complex. Going to Hoover Middle School, I actually was assessed and determined that I had to be placed in honors classes. Going from one experience to the other was like, wow.
I got politicized into the community work through getting involved in the Spanish Club my freshmen year at San Jose High Academy. Now, it’s called San Jose High School. My teacher was like, “You want to be president?” my sophomore year, and I was like, sure. At that time, there was an honoring of Cesar Chavez, a one year commemoration of his death. He died in 1993. There was a march being organized downtown, and 10,000 people came through. It was one of the biggest marches in downtown San José. I got involved with that march because my friend made a classroom announcement saying, “Hey everyone, my parents are members of the United Farm Workers (UFW.)” My family was a peasant family in México. I totally connected with [the movement].
Through that classroom announcement, I got invited to this commemoration and other UFW activities at that time considering it was one year since he passed away. He was organizing La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), another organization within UFW that focuses on the organizing of farm workers. UFW focused on labor rights specific to the farm workers. LUPE did the community organizing around educational justice and environmental racism through a faith based model. “Lupe” is short for Guadalupe in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was key for UFW organizing.
From the classroom announcement, getting involved with the Cesar Chavez one-year commemoration, to being president of the Spanish Club, I started organizing cultural activities like school dances, karaoke look a-likes, lunch rallies, to cultural events like Cinco de Mayo. We raised money for scholarships so that people had some money for their college goals. We did a lot around college readiness, and we organized the highest attending school dances on that campus. I was an organizer before I knew it.
It was also 1994 and Prop 187 came about. Everybody was organizing walkouts. I was also getting mentored by the elders of the Chicano movement. There was a gap in intergenerational organizing. The people organizing in the Chicano movement in the 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s allowed for the people in the 80’s to benefit from all the movement organizing on top of the Reaganomics and neoliberal policies that allowed for people to have a house, white fence, and green grass. By the time that Prop 187 hit, it was a new generation of organizers but disconnected from the older generation.
I ended up organizing Sureño gang members and the same girl who gave the classroom announcement organized the Norteños. When it was declared that there was a statewide action of walkouts, we totally walked out. We did it under the principles of the Chicano movement. The law said that state workers — that includes teachers, workers in public services and public health systems — were going to snitch if you were a migrant. If the law had passed, it would say that state workers would have to report anyone who was undocumented. It was very close to what happened in 2006 with HR 4437. So, we hella walked out. I definitely got politicized in that way.
There are all these layers. Here I am with the older generation of Chicano organizers. On the other hand, I’m also developing basic leadership skills through being involved with the club. Then, the political climate was saying, you need to step and be fierce, dear youth. Speak up because your community is being attacked.
After, I went to San Jose State University(SJSU) and tried to navigate college. I was in a weird place because I was the only one that “made it” from my close circle of friends. Many of my friends were first generation migrants, and so, they started working right away because school had failed to prepare us for college or sometimes, their only option was to work.
At SJSU, I ended up getting involved with Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (M.E.Ch.A.) the first year. That first year that I got involved was the final year of the campaign to bring the MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center to San Jose State. So M.E.Ch.A. was a part of other progressive student groups to campaign for a multi-cultural center at San Jose State. I got to witness my previous generation of SJSU classmates make some awesome beautiful magic and leave a legacy for us.
I was part of a community service-learning program for two years. There were over 10 of us. We really developed an intersectional and multi-sectoral group. We were really progressive. I don’t think our professor was ready for how progressive we were. We got politicized together, and together we led the efforts around addressing the 9/11 attacks to the point where we ended organizing the biggest event in the city. We had 3000 people at the vigil we organized. We had a really famous Muslim basketball NBA player come to speak, and there were intersectional speakers. Back then, my major was Public Relations, so I had became the PR person for that work.
We started organizing around homelessness, displacement, gentrification, Ethnic Studies, Filipino issues, I mean, everything! We ended up creating an after school program for homeless children. I created the open mic at San José State that’s still there — the Word Open Mic at the MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center. We did a lot of cultural work. We ended up creating Cafecitos and MECCA nights which took place downtown at Iguana’s for Muslim folks to hold an open mic for themselves.
Joseph Miclette also created Lyrical Discipline, a hip hop open mic. We used to hold Thursday Sessions where we would get together at someone’s house where we would talk about progressive politics while someone DJ’ed. A lot of magic happened during those four to six years there at State. In that cohort of academic service learning, we all became amazing beautiful people who are still contributing somewhere. Vanessa and others created Fifth Element, a woman hip-hop group in San José. Tyson Amir became an Islamic hip hop brother. He traveled around the world doing Islamic Hip Hop who’s now a teacher in the San Francisco jail system. He published a book of poetry called Black Boy Poems. It’s his story of being a black man in San Jose. He’s one of the best lyricists. As soon as I graduated, I started MAIZ San Jose. Maribel Martinez became the first Latina Student Body president of the campus managing a million dollar budget or more. Now, she’s a Director for the Office of LGBTQ Affairs for Santa Clara County. Everybody has done amazing things.
If you believe in magic (I believe in magic), we were meant to meet each other. We continue the work. We push each other. We did amazing things as students, on campus, and in the community. Soon after we graduated, we’re still in the movement.
I think what was really key [was that] I grew up brown, first-generation, and with Spanish speaking music. I grew up sheltered from American pop culture and so going to college was a culture shock. Being in this intersectional group allowed me to expand and see the connections of how we both struggled together and make shit happen. [I saw] how our communities contribute to the social fabric of what we now know as America.
I had the idea of MAIZ when I was actually heavily involved with the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants (PAWIS.) It used to be known as Filipino Community Support (FOCUS) with Mara Ibarra, co-founded with Jay Mendoza. I was involved with the FOCUS youth branch which was called Bagong Bayan. We did work with PAWIS in 2002 with the airport screeners campaign. I learned a lot during that time being immersed in serving the Filipino community in San José. By that time, I got inspired to create something with my own peeps.
MAIZ became a youth cultural group. It launched in that momentum leading to May 1, 2006 by creating a youth contingent. We did some cultural work. We marched and held dialogues and cultural events. Then, we developed a youth space, and then a women space. We tried to organize teachers, too — people for education. The women space was called Cihuatl Tlatocan, which in Nahuatl means “gathering for women.” The youth space was called Youth Against Violence for Education, and it was inspired by unfortunately, seven killings in the Seven Trees neighborhood within seven months. I remember the number seven. We did flyering and everything. We had a partnership with Andrew Hill High School, and counselor, Joshua Green, gave us a space to do an after-school program with the youth there. We ended up creating a community dialogue around the violence and tying it with economic analysis. We had leaders come through — it was amazing magic. It was from 2006 to 2011.
In 2013, a lot of the women leaders of MAIZ all had babies in the same year. We all took a step back to be mommies and build community with our babies and our families. It’s been nice. We want to come back now because the babies are more independent, they’re four now. They’re definitely walking on their own, and talking on their own. We’re raising subversive children.
People have been approaching us saying, I want to be a part of MAIZ, but I’m trying to assess: how’s it going to look like? How are we going to do intersectional, multigenerational work in one space? When we had the women space, we were all in our early 30s and late 20s. It’s not the same anymore. We acknowledge that we’re moms now. How do we organize as moms? What are the possible campaigns?
People get attracted to MAIZ because of the cultural work. They love how we do our cultural work and how blended it into our organizing. I think a lot of people miss MAIZ but I need to figure out how to do a campaign.
We did an action in September of last year, 2017, due to the announcement around DACA being shut down. It was 108 degree weather and we had a rally of over 100 people, all organized in four days. That experience told me, “Alright, we got this.” How do you do that with over a hundred people in the most inconvenient weather? It gave me more confidence about who’s really on board.
There’s a spiritual aspect to your work that connects with your native roots. How do you make sure that your spirit is healthy doing this work? How do you meld your activism with spirituality?
That’s a whole another layer of identity building. When I was at San José High School as a junior in 1996, I joined a statewide leadership, weeklong camp called the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Conference. You learn about Chicano history, Latino history, and about policy, advocacy, community organizing, and culture. You stay in these dorms at CSU Sacramento. We got to visit key leaders at the Capitol and they brought out indigenous dancing as well. There, I met a lot of the organizers against Prop 187 in ’94, ’95. In essence, I got to meet a new generation of youth leaders.
By the time I got to San Jose State, one of the friends that I met there — he was a youth leader in San Diego mentored by Chicano activists. (There is some fierce organizing in San Diego considering they’re at the border — where more is there a clear contradiction of how America shows up against our people.) He ended up going to Berkeley while I was at State. We ended up meeting up and he said, I’m going to a sweat lodge in Watsonville by elders (an elder is someone over 52) who settled down in Watsonville and created an Aztec dance group, White Hawk. They had a Toquali or a Peyote ceremony. I got involved and it became like heaven, my refuge. That was in 2000 and I created relationships with people who took care of the medicine. They would have a sweat lodge every week, and every weekend I was there, unless there were some actions or I had family commitments.
I got introduced to Aztec dancing when I was in high school and I fell in love with it. I never got a chance to join it, but that’s my weakness — I love Aztec dancing! I love how it feels when the drum goes, and now as a mother, I get it. The drum beat is a reflection of the heart beat — it is the first song and the first means of communication that you send to your child in the womb. At the end of the day as humans, we get called by the drum.
In your span of movement building in San José, what have been some challenges and victories as a Chicanx organizer?
There’s very few of us that have stuck around — that are in it as a lifestyle, Chicanx wise, considering that we don’t have a bi-national liberation front per se. The only model is the Zapatistas (EZLN) and how they lead a people’s liberation struggle. In essence, that’s the contemporary school of thought of organizing. I’m still trying to figure out and maintain a base, an intergenerational base here that is aligned to what EZLN is doing because it’s doing beautiful work. They’re impacting the world by what they did — not to say that it had its struggles and its challenges, of course. A lot of it had to with sexism and patriarchy but the women are stepping up and you can tell by their recent first International Gathering of Politics, Arts, Sports, and Culture. I’ve noticed that, as a thirty something, I’m one of the few that pays attention to both the politics of México here and there’s not too many people committed to be organizers.
But [also,] I’m the older daughter. I have to be a caregiver for my parents. I’m not just there for me and my son, but I’m there for my parents as they’re getting older. That’s my personal struggle, which is not limited to what my peers are going through. Some of them had to be there for their parents before they became moms. We’re there for family a lot and we have our own personal struggles, traumas, and dramas that we got to attend to before we have to be there and serve some body else.
[At the same time,] there is beautiful San José history. Saul Verduzco, my friend and San José State classmate, helped create the first AB 540 student group in the nation, Students for a Higher Education (SAHE), and it gave inspiration for other campuses to organize their own AB 540 groups. Groups like SAHE inspired the folks that now run United We Dream. San José contributes hardcore to social change. We are catalysts here. The first walkouts were heré. My mentors in San José were mentoring the Los Angeles folks who did the walkouts in March 1968, and boom, it became a part of the media.
What words of wisdom do you have for young organizers?
Go to the elders. Reach out to them via social media and tap into them. Be fearless. Our indigenous medicine says you can dream a better world. All you have to do is implement it. You got quotes by Angela Davis and Che Guevarra. You got political quotes to sustain that. We are our ancestors’ dreams come true. I do see a lot of fearlessness particularly within undocumented communities and undocumented students.
The undocumented students became the new brown, Latinx movement. [They are] fearless because they are redefining what citizenship is, redefining what agency is, how to exist in this idea beyond nationality and redefining what home is. Some of the politics [they have] feel problematic in the sense that [they] want to claim the United States as our home. That’s super problematic but it’s making some gains nonetheless. Families do stay together especially families like mine. In my family of six, we have three citizens by birth, one citizen that went through a pathway to citizenship, and two green card holders. Easily under Trump, two people could be [deported] because of criminal acts. We’re lucky that nothing has happened but it could happen.
I would say to youth be fearless, we got you. My generation was able to do so much but your generation is probably going to do more because you have more capacity, more resources, and less fear filters. You have more models of inspiration whereas my generation had up until the 1990s worth of history of struggle. You have an extra fifteen years of beautiful work that has happened, and it has been around the undocumented student struggle.
