Throwing Shade to the West

It is impossible to describe what it means to find place -- to feel, finally, that you might just belong to something larger than your own personal conflicted and too often conflated story. For me (and quite privately, as there was no ‘place’ for this queer mestiza in the early days del movimiento), Aztlán was my sacred and profound grounding. My spiritual (land) base. It housed my Spanglish language; my nahuatl imaginings and my queer silences. Perhaps it spoke to the subtle and subliminal messages of my own Native origins in the deserts of Sonora or the pure thrust of mestiza consciencia I inherited from my 19th century MexicanAmerican upbringing in the shadow of the Old San Gabriel Mission.

I remember the first time I returned to the Sonora desert at the mere age of eight. I promise you, the saguaro, the ocotillo, the mesquite sang to me. Old, very old songs. I credit the concept of Aztlán for igniting in this (sub)urban MexicanAmerican the ánima to search for home – lugar/hogar -- in the first place. With or without male acknowledgment or Indian entitlement, I/we claimed our “Queer Aztlán.” (2) I do not know the songs of the Chumash along the coastal lands where I reside today.

I do not know the songs of the Tongva where I was raised. But I did grow up with mixed- blood and a hundred percent Indian peoples with Spanish last names, just like my cousins and tíos y tías – el mismo apellido que llevo yo ahora. And I was compelled to return. So, like our collective ancestors and so many of my generation, I went south . . . placing my own little patitas on that map of descent into my meXican[x] origins.

Re-search. It requires embodied engagement. It is to stumble upon the sacred in the act of return. It is to get well and whole again – not individually (as West would have it in the privacy of therapy) but collectively with our feet on the ground. As Xicana[x] writers, artists, and activists, we re-search for a people.

. . .

© 2019 by Cherríe Moraga.

Moraga. “Queer Aztlán – The Reformation of Chicano Tribe” in The Last Generation. Boston, South End Press, 1993.