Ramiro Alvarez, reflection #1

“brown boys” by florentino diaz

For much, if not all of my life, I have felt sensitive. I have felt and “acted” sensitive: tearing up through any emotion, even happy ones, howling after any scrape, cut, or bruise, and spending too much time alone with my mother. Of course, “sensitive” was not the word the other boys were flinging at me. Sensitive was a word reserved for my mother. Sensible, tierno, delicado. And while she definitely worried about her sensitive son, especially when she wondered about what kind of man I would grow up to be, it seldom bothered her and she never hesitated to listen to me cry, even now at twenty-three. 

Sensitive is not a fun place to life your life out of at times. Sensitive, in a world that seems to spin on aggression and competition, keeps you lonely, it keeps you anxious, and it keeps you vigilant—of your behaviors, your words, your reactions, and your thoughts. Layering onto that natural inclination to surveil myself harder came homophobia, racism, and machismo. Growing up brown, effeminate, and queer brought the harsh magnifying glass right above my most tender parts and eventually, I trained my own mind to second-guess itself, to belittle itself, and to never be content with where I am, but instead to draw happiness from the possibilities of what I could become. To no surprise I became clinically depressed.

I was lucky enough to enter college around such an exploratory age—my late teens and early twenties, something many people take for granted. It is at this university where I began to reconcile my need to express my sensitivity with my desires to provide myself a career path. Naturally, I was drawn to social movements. Finally, I was living in a reality that was supposed to validate my struggles as struggles beyond things I needed to “fix” about myself. Finally, the issue existed outside of me. Finally, there was space for me to be disappointed by life, shocked by violence, and left in tears by the atrocities I could not seem to stop focusing on. Finally, my set of skills: communicating hurt, holding people accountable to their passive/micro aggressions, and doing the emotional labor of others seemed like it was going to pay off big time; I was going to be a social worker! Or something…

"untitled" by patricia bordallo dibildox and florentino diaz

One of those early and very formative places was within the ideological terrains of Chicanismo. While it seemed a generational thing I could not fully sync with, I noticed emerging subgroups within the movement calling themselves Xican@s, Chicanxs, and even Xicanxs that spoke to a more present-day experience of Mexican American-ness that took time to look at gender, gender expression, diversity of sexualities, and bodies. But the “new” Xicanx identity was not very accessible. There simply was not enough writing or art being shared around that dealt with these “denser” topics as they intersected with race and nation. The works of these young Xicanxs was kept archived not across paper, but across slam poetry performances, blogs, art across our bodies in the forms of tattoos and piercings, within relationships, in dance steps, and in dreams.

Fortunately, while in school I was able to learn from the more classic identity: Chicano, as it stood in the sixties and seventies. Now research savvy, I dove deep into the movement’s history and found an eerie parallel to my own internal conflict. But before that, I felt “wrong” again. For such a long time after initially connecting myself to the political alignment of the Chicano, I was hyper-surveilling myself again. I was host to thoughts that felt less rooted to me and more connected to an external understanding I absolutely had to internalize and had no role in creating, much like masculinity.

All my life older men had made me feel ashamed for trying to balance and reconcile my emotions and my logic. Older men had chastised me for not dwelling on values like tirelessness, toughness, sacrifice, order, and individualism (ego) exclusively. My hopes to be all those things and also be fragile, whole, chaotic, communal, and compassionate were not allowed in masculinity. This did not change among the writings, histories, and narratives of the popularized Chicano movement. Again, I found myself in a space full of men, this time with my peers and some elders that romanticized militancy, legal rights, and logic to pursue their idea of liberation.

It was not until I stumbled across intersectionalism that I began to see that eerie parallel I mentioned early. Intersectionality, and by extension the works of legendary and contemporary radical poets and feminists of color, often queer Black women, gave me a new insight into myself that I am eternally grateful for. I began to believe in an authentic self. I began to understand the bigger picture of what it means to be Ramiro and in that overwhelming experience, I noticed the complexity of the self, but also how the self is a mirror or microcosm of social movements. It became apparent that mining my past for insight and making peace with said past would help me return to a life that takes place in the moment. After all, for me, anxiety has never been anything but an obsessive fixation on the future with shame and guilt shooting up from the past, barring me from sacredness of the moment.

Just like that, “Chicano” became “Ramiro”. I saw the movement much how I saw myself: an amazing force thirsty for freedom, but with skills unbalanced and emotional creativity undeveloped. That lack of balance came from self-sabotage. It came from refusing to listen to the ways my logic and emotions naturally reconciled themselves within me, from refusing to be patient, from refusing to be my complete self in everything that I do, and from refusing to be intuitive. But it did not always feel like self-sabotage because it was rewarded so often. I experience a much easier life, filled with far more opportunities for me to be remembered as "important", all because I man. In other words, because the Chicano movement’s foundation was created almost exclusively by men as a result of their fear for all things feminine within themselves (and by projection, women), the movement fell into fragility so quickly after its prime as a result of sabotage, a lot like myself in later college years. 

Author bell hooks refers to this self-sabotage psychic self-mutilation. “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

Like all people working against the system, movements also fall into states of fragility and depression. But when faced with fragility, the best thing one can do is to feel it through and through. To learn from it. To embrace this cyclical flow between abundance and scarcity of energy, as is the flow of the seasons, as is the flow of self-care. But without any voice to lead that healing, without anyone to validate that importance of breaking before rebuilding again (to winter and then spring), the movements became a massive vehicle of community harm, notably at the expense of women. However, it was not that those experts on healing, wholeness, and transgression were not there, it is that they were not welcome. Queer men, women in general, non-binary people, Black Chicanos, or anyone that wanted to focus on the present issues (sexism included) were preferably unheard and excluded from the movement that was too deep into its long-term goals. So, the Chicano body could not hear itself because it artificially segmented itself instead of doing the hard work it takes to deal with everything the body needs. In the case of Chicanismo, sexism and sexual pleasure were ignored despite being vital to the true collective, among other issues.

Professor Cotera’s project then becomes a metaphor for therapy in my eyes. I see the work of digital archives as something like giving one’s self therapy through honesty. But, instead of individual experiences, the pieces we must reassemble for this act of macro self care are whole stories of people, as people, not events, represent and carry the collective memory of the Chicano movement. In collecting these incredibly necessary oral histories we are beginning to make peace with our past as Chicanos. We are learning that time is in fact not linear, and that the past has as much to be planned for as the future, for there is no chance at living a liberated tomorrow without coming back to the present and being content—being happy, well nourished, and critical Chicanos before objects of activism.

I enrolled in professor Cotera’s class to learn more about my process and myself, as much of it is still extremely confusing. I enrolled because Cotera is providing a safe and effective model for us to practice history reunification, reconciliation between the emotional and logical, a balance that does not live in camps of masculine and feminine, but inside each of us, all the time. I enrolled to thrive as sensitive, to embrace my uniqueness and reorient myself into the true Chicano movement, which I believe is more accurately the Chicana movement. 

In healing the Chicano movement, in healing myself, I hope to discover the true nature of the Chicano movement and its sensitive side. Which, with each passing day of this class, seems that it was clearly carried on the backs of gender and sexual minorities. We are essentially redefining Chicano by bringing the movement closer to its roots through memory recollection. We are not comparing, “bettering”, or perfecting anything. We are simply trying to be authentic in how we heal from the trauma we inflected on ourselves, which is a trauma often learned outside ourselves and through the toxic systems of sexism, racism, and imperialism. And that is a lesson that will extend far beyond the classroom. This is the lesson of recovery.

“these great divisions hurt me but i’ll find home again” by florentino diaz