4 MORE YEARS!

The site is still up... for at least another four more years! Now if I can motivate myself (and OTHERS!!) to write!

You will be seeing me soon, promise!

Mexican American Studies in Texas

Here shortly I will be talking to a community college professor that teaches MAS. They actually have a degree for MAS at the community college level. Texas sure is interesting! More to be said later.

Paz -

Layla

Inspiration in Texas

It was in Dubai where I received my initial exposure to Mexican American Studies and Gloria Anzaldúa. It was in Tucson where I rediscovered both in my Writing 2 course. Then the following semester I took my first Mexican American Studies course. I joined MEChA. I got involved in my community and the rest is history.

Today I felt that love and inspiration that I had back home. Actually it initially came last Wednesday in my course Women, Change, and Society. I was given the opportunity to choose a woman and a gender studies concept to write a VERY short paper on. Who did I choose? Of course Ms. Gloria Anzaldúa. I felt that inspiration flood my soul and lift me up out of my doldrums from boring school.


Now to the young ladies floating out and about on the net: those of you who are young and I mean under 30, you might think you know who you are right now. Those still in their teens may be thinking I know it all and I can conquer the world. Well first off keep thinking you can conquer the world because with that attitude - you will. Teens, you are still wandering around in the dark but you have a chem light (glow stick) helping you out. Ladies in your twenties - hopefully you still have that desire and hopefulness you had in your teens. You now have found a flashlight and can see a little bit more in the dark. Your path is lit and a bit more visible. We in our 30's have had a light bulb click on and now we can see all over. It's a soft light but at least we have the ability to see everything for what it's worth. I firmly believe in our 40's that little light bulb will change into a florescent light and things are way clearer. In our 50's and beyond - we walk out into the sun and feel it's beauty, warmth and all revealing light. Each decade we are alive we experience something new, inspiring, and eye opening. 


Here in Texas, inspiration is still filling me. Hopefully where you are, inspiration is filling you. 

Muchos besos - 


Layla

Video Posted!

It's taken long enough but it's finally here! A video from my collection of photos is now up on YouTube. The video entitled Arizona Rise Up! is now available for your viewing pleasure. It's my first video so please be gentle!

Paz -

Layla

The Tucsonan moved East

It's been two and a half months since I left my home in Tucson and journeyed East, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about my brothers and sisters at home.

I have read the updates from Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths. I have looked online and read a few stories coming out of Tucson. I have often thought of my friends and wondered how things are really going back home. I am slightly out of touch though.

Months back, I made the decision to delete my Facebook account. I wanted to rid my life of the drama and I was curious as to who was truly my friend. I was surprised. I barely hear any of the movement news now. I could readily seek it out of course. I could be nagging people for news. I actually choose not to these days. Not because I am not curious, just because I know I need to find my niche here in Texas. I read what I can when I can about Tucson and my brothers and sisters, but it's time for this mujer to find where she belongs - here in her home.

So here I am, in the land of the Puffy Taco, the Hill Country, the Alamo City, my beloved San Antonio. Here I am working at a federal job, going to school (at Texas A&M San Antonio) and looking to do good work helping Latinas.

I haven't given up at all. I am actually working in a military hospital and hopefully one day after I graduate (again) I will be able to work in the Psychology/Mental Health unit at one of the hospitals to assist my beautiful sisters. I have hopes.

I greatly miss my family back in Tucson but do know you are all in my heart and soul. It's time to expand the reach and see who else we can help, this time in another state. Tucson you have trained me well. I can only hope and believe in the best of outcomes.

This is the Texas chapter of Chicana Magazine. Tucson, continue doing your good work.

A Manifesto

We have been placed in a time in our culture’s history to test the abilities to utilize any means necessary to ensuring its preservation. We gather not to mourn, contemplate on the culmination of injustice, nor to grieve. We do not hate. Resentment is for the brutal, infuriated minds of those unwilling to accept our desire to stand on the soil of our ancestors while redefining what it means to grow upwards. While saguaros salute sunsets blanketed with magenta clouds, we hold hands to do what needs to be done to certify our presence in the jagged edges of the mountain ranges hugging our space…Our space for voice.

We are a force Tucson has yet to see. Silently, behind mural covered walls, we bullet-point our agenda to take back the education that has been forced from our mind’s grasp. The nation had yet to see this category of social injustice, until the summer of 2010 when elected officials ripped the ability to learn the history of the Mexican American presence and literature from the young minds of thriving youth. The privilege given to the unprivileged youth of America was denounced to the letters and numbers of HB2281: A bill that says our history is thus illegal. A bill that has caused national attention because the mere idea of banning ethnic studies seems outrageous to the general public. But what seems outrageous to outsiders is just consistency in how Arizona is governed.

In a public education system that has failed the youth of Tucson consistently and relentlessly with a 50/50 chance of graduating, but an array of private prison networks ready to take in new occupants, ethnic studies teachers have become leaders to promote the importance of our presence in the history of the United States. They have valorized the ability to empower young minds that never had outlets to express themselves. It seems only contradictory that a state would make a mission to undo what success has been done in the Tucson community. They say it’s for the sake of America. So we are a presence ready to deface the image of what it means to be American if and only if we are not allowed to be who we are alongside who we want to be.

We do not hate America. We do not move forward to create a movement whose mission is to disrupt the values America holds. In fact, we engage in a movement that has been fought since before our time, before our politicized representation and before even our parents understood what a better life would really mean; all to illustrate the values of America. We move forward to add to the momentum of unity, feeling the friction of legislations against the soles of our feet. Despite what laws imply, we only move forward for the sake of cultural prosperity, indigenous connections to the beauty of tu eres me otro yo. Because in the end, if we could face the system at a podium made only for those who identify in a two-party system, we would say:

You are my other me.

We are in a place that bases its history off of physical, steel divisions. We fail to include the land. The land that used to be free to roam upon, free to appreciate and free to migrate the ways in which Europeans were able to do upon indigenous land in the northeast. But we do not utilize this precious knowledge for the sake of ownership. We do not resent. We, instead, march for the mercy of understanding that many worlds may justifiably fit into one. Though land is colonized by these divided beliefs, we decolonize hatred against us, ownership over our history, and the exclusion of our voices from what legitimizes culture.

We, in turn, delegitimize the ways in which Arizona legislators have pressured us all to feel against what America truly values. Forces of our opposition have stood tall in Phoenix, holding flags imprinted with swastikas, while burning the Mexican emblem in the heat of an Arizona summer. They used fire to create anger, fear and unfortunately, solidarity with supremacist attitudes that invigorated civil rights movements in the South. We will not be the New South. We should have learned that fires do not engrain sensitivity for respecting the presence of diversity. We should have realized that the only way to serve a people is to allow them to preserve what little history they may have to look back on. We shouldn’t be banning history. We should be implementing the practice of looking back at what mistakes were made to reinforce an inclusion of those treated as less of a person.

As essential as that may seem, we are in a state that hasn’t yet caught on to equality.

We could have instilled anger. We could have reacted with violence.

We could have used the rights of lenient Arizona gun laws.

We could have raided buildings, burned our own fires, and raised our own flags.

But instead, we simply urge you. We urge you to reconcile prospects of conservatism, liberalism, right-wing, left-wing, religious, and apathy, to glorify your appreciation for the freedom to simply accept. As you appreciate the landscape of the Arizona Southwest, feel the culture like the rays of summer. Feel the voices of those have yet to speak like gusts from monsoons. Feel the idea of embracing human beings outside the context of legality. Embrace humanity as a unified force. Knowing where you are contextually is the connection between what you can change, what you can aspire to, and how you can admire those near you with a disengagement from injustice.

God Doesn’t Discriminate, Why Should Utah?

Video would not load, please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m_6d1VOSWw For the clip.

On Monday, January 24^th, the first day of the Utah Legislature, the state representatives were greeted with a sample of the year they have ahead of them. With several bills aimed at attacking brown people in the works, they have viewed the hate, division, loss of revenue by the millions as a good thing, as long as it is in the name of discrimination, which makes it worth it. A small, but effective crowd of over 100 people gathered with a common theme of "Don't Let Utah Become Arizona," was organized by members of United for Social Justice, a Utah-based activist organization.

There are new bills being put forward in states all across the country, with many of them looking to the AZ 1070 bill for guidance, but many also calling for a more moderate version, as the push back in Arizona has been devastating to the state budget, reputation and court system. Utah, somehow, and for some reason apparently sees all this as ‘collateral damage’ in the war against their gardeners in that they are pushing to take even farther a law that has already been deemed mostly illegal. But, I suppose when you look at a state that was founded in an attempt to cause a civil war against the United States, Contempt and outright ignoring federal law should not be seen as something too unusual.

Online activist group, Cuentame has assisted in placing a billboard in the commuter path on 4055 S. I-15 Northbound in Utah in an attempt to shed what should be some common sense light to a religious community asking a very simple question of why would they discriminate if their god does not? The fight is just beginning in Utah, and they do not have the numbers to push back quite as hard as those in Phoenix. However, one thing they do have that we all share everywhere is the people there are just as human there as they are in my own home and yours. I stand in spirit with my Utah brothers and sisters in the attacks against a people the state thinks will not fight back against. I ask that all of you, especially those in Arizona who are already going through a personal hell with your laws, look to your friends up north and unite, because we are all fighting the same fight.