“Home y La Esperanza Que Siempre Alcanza” ("Home and Ever-Present Hope") by Aracely Lara

It gives me great joy to introduce, Aracely Lara, to my column of "Weaving Healing in Spaces of Latinx vulnerability." Aracely’s writing is healing like water. It flows with imagination and nostalgia. And like water, Aracely’s writing is nourishing, filling the heart with emotion of sustaining hope. 

-Itzel G. Garcia

March 21, 2021

This powerful reflection is third in Itzel's blog series titled:

"Weaving Healing in Spaces of Latinx Vulnerability"

by

Aracely Lara

I am anxious when I write. While working on my research, “Visual Forms of Transformation and Resistance: a Close Reading of East Austin’s Murals,” I began to stall the project’s writing process. My mentor,  Folklorist and Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Rachel Gonzalez-Martin, then suggested I ease myself back into the project through writing. Dr. Gonzalez posed the question of what lay behind my motivation to conduct this research in hopes that going back to the reflection would motivate me to keep writing. What resulted is this essay titled, “Home y La Esperanza Que Siempre Alcanza” (“Home and Ever-Present Hope”) that reflects on my family’s struggles and experiences that imbue me today with a deep, creative sense of what I call “home.”

***

      Unearthing a place to live is complicated. There is reoccurring strife that I recognize in the life of my family. It has been that way for as long as my parents have lived. As long as my parents have been together and as long as they have built our family, acquiring a space to thrive is challenging. My paternal grandfather, Eduardo Lara’s dream, was for stability. According to apá, my grandfather Eduardo worked in construction. Apá says that Grandfather Eduardo built houses for people, people that needed them. He was always helping and working with his community in the Matamoros, Mexico. My grandfather, Eduardo, died after running errands with my dad. Apá was ten when they killed his father.  

        After the death of my grandfather, Eduardo, apá would carry a level with him everywhere he went. Apá says that people would pull him aside, and as they pointed towards their home, they would tell apá that his father built their home. In response, apá would pull out a level and measure the house. When apá was certain that the house was completely and neatly perfect, he would nod with a look of pride and self-satisfaction.

        My grandfather Eduardo embedded in apá a love of the earth, together with the process of destroying and constructing with his hands, a gift that he passed down to me.

        My mother is from El Mango, Comunidad Tandzumadz, Huehuetlan, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. My mom grew up planting seeds with my grandfather, Nazario, and baking bread with my grandmother, Paula. My mother’s childhood was interrupted by an older man. He decided he was going to take amá away, but a family friend warned my grandparents. They decided to send her to Matamoros to live with her cousin. Years after, she met my father in Matamoros. Later, when amá was pregnant with my older brother, apá would work on farms in the U.S. My father would travel back and forth on the border until he couldn't anymore.  

      My father had to stay in Texas and sent for my mother to cross a couple of months later. My mother attempted to cross the border three times. She was caught twice. The third time my mother crossed the border, my dad’s aunt gave amá a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She asked my mom to repeat a prayer to Our Lady. My mother told me she was scared. All she could think about was the prayer. When the bus got to the border, it was raining. Amá said the rain was heavy and the day was dark. Because of the weather, they let the bus pass without a checkpoint. My mother was able to come to the U.S.

        A summary of my family’s experience with home. A tiny white apartment holding my mom, dad, and brother. Having to leave the apartment because my dad was struggling to find work. We moved to a little green house, living with my paternal grandmother, Maria. I was born in the little  green house. After Grandmother Maria incited a fight between my parents, my mother left my father. We left the little green house for a little RV that protected three families. The little RV was next to a giant bayou, and toads took over the roads. It was my favorite home. A while later, apá found a little trailer in the middle of nowhere. My parents got back together por la familia, they said.

        So we left the RV to live with apá. In our new place, the owner changed his mind and asked us to leave after a month. He gave us three days. 

    Then we found Cora Street. 

      Cora Street is a trailer park. My family moved within this trailer park four times. My experiences in this neighborhood cemented the concepts of art as transformative of space and my parents as artists. Cora Street was a giant circle with another trailer section in the middle. We lived with my aunt in the middle of Cora Street in a cream-colored trailer until my father was deported. 

        After my father's deportation, amá was forced to live with my grandmother, Maria. Grandmother Maria’s trailer resided on the outer circle of trailers in Cora Street. Grandmother Maria maintained different plantitas and trees including tamarindo, guava, limones, and a giant tree full of oranges. While we lived with my grandmother, Maria, we would receive an occasional call from apá, and a prolonged conflict about my grandmother stealing money from the funds my father sent to amá, resumed.

        A week later amá found out she was pregnant. She decided that it would be best to move into a bright-yellow trailer that anxiously sat on the far back of Cora Street with my aunt Rosy. My siblings and I would share a mattress on the floor with amá. The bright yellow trailer seemed frail and unsteady, but amá fortified the trailer’s foundation with her stories of running through el monte to get to school and meeting a nagual (a personal, guardian animal spirit). She shared that those experiences lead her to believe that we are always protected. Her comfort and strength reassured us that the roof and walls wouldn’t crumble in our sleep. 

        A month before amá gave birth, dad successfully crossed the border. We moved into a green trailer around the entrance of Cora Street. Because we lived at the entrance, the neighborhood gangs would fight in front of our trailer. My siblings and I were frequently woken up by our parents, urging us to get under the bed. Despite those occasions, I will always love Cora Street.

        On Cora Street, I found that my family transformed space physically and spiritually. In a  physical sense, my father used a mallet to break down the trailer walls. My parents’ ability to re-envision our reality was magical to witness. I loved my dad’s tiling work. He would cement the hallway, and I would pass him my favorite tiles. Together, we paved the trailer’s floors. Our trailer’s spiritual transformation would happen during the days that my parents were not able to afford the light bill. After praying, amá would light candles and tell stories about UFOs, La  Llorona, death, and fairies. I now understand that the physical changes that our trailer underwent not only re-asserted our ever-present hope for family stability, but like East Austin murals, represent revitalizing expressions of survival that re-create our world anew.

Aracely Lara is a senior, majoring in English and Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin who also volunteers at Academia Cuauhtli.

"Winter Storm Reflections on the Notion of ‘Collapse’ for our Academia Cuauhtli Mothers"

"Winter Storm Reflections on the Notion of ‘Collapse’ for our Academia Cuauhtli Mothers"

by 

Itzel G. García

March 5, 2021

This powerful reflection is second in Itzel's blog series titled:

"Weaving Healing in Spaces of Latinx Vulnerability"

A. Valenzuela took this photo of Itzel G. Garcia on Feb. 22, 2021, who received items

for 40 Academia Cuauhtli families in the wake of the treacherous Winter storm.

Over the week of the Texas Snowstorm in February 2021, I was able to talk to the families of Sanchez, Travis Heights and Harris elementary of Austin Independent school district. These are the families whose children attend our Saturday school, Academia Cuauhtli ("Eagle Academy" in Nahuatl). Their many stories reflected my own personal interpretation of the symbolism of the storm, a symbolism of a fallen, dead system that must be put to rest.

The day after the storm, I got up at 4:32 AM and I saw the snow, the blanket of delicate and subtle purity. It expanded all over my vision as the world rested, as everyone slept. The heavy blanket of nieve over the world, protecting the earth—maybe from us, maybe from the machine of capitalism. 

The next morning, it was chaotic. I had power, but many others did not. My grandparents in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and my mother in the Rio grande Valley, had no electricity or water. Even if I did have electricity, I felt a deep sense of solitude around me existing in a home space that did not feel like my own, surrounded by white identities based on capital materialism, identities that dreamed solely white dreams. 

I’ve felt alienated ever since attending the University of Texas at Austin, but refusing to give up on my dream of having a career, a purpose, a connection to stability, influenced my decision to establish myself in Austin. Cuauhtli has become more than all those things. When I talk to these families, I feel I am extending my own sense of family through creating vulnerable connections. Because we truly are that: familia, vinculados a través de los ancestros. 

Most of the people that I call to reach out on behalf of the program are mothers. When I talk to them I feel they are like my tías— or some my abuelitas. Some remind me of my mother. They share a common dignity and shyness of asking for help. They are all grateful and always extend that gratitude to Cuauhtli. They bless me, very often. Dios bendiga a usted, muchacha. 

I do feel their blessings very deeply—especially in having the opportunity to help. 

I call Doña Rosa Blanca first, because she is the one who showed me my path in Cuauhtli in many ways. The first time I talked to Doña Rosa Blanca on the phone was unique—I had never met her children and they had stopped going to Cuauhtli because of the death of their father. I called during the pandemic and she said, they had suffered through death. She said her daughters had written stories about her and her immigration to the U.S. That they would write the stories she would tell them. Aurora y Atardecer son sus hijas. I told her I was a writer too and my father had also died. I’ve had spiritual, memory-based and emotional conversations with Doña Rosa Blanca. 

This time she confesses to me that she was in part a bad mother, and in part a good one. During the snowstorm, she felt the temperature wouldn’t be so bad so instead of finding a warm space for their daughters, she thought they could stay. She tells me she felt guilty for exposing their lives to the storm’s brutal force. But in part she felt she was a good mother, because through that risk, her daughters were able to experience something Doña Rosa Blanca remembered from childhood. 

“Cuando pasabamos por los vecinos yo veía que estaban haciendo lumbres y me dije, ‘Esto me recuerda algo. Ah! Así es México.’” 

She remembered when she was a child and the people in the community would create fires. She tells me that her daughters exclaimed how magical they felt everything was. 

“Mira mamá los vecinos tienen fuego. Mira mamá la nieve.” 

I don’t mean to romanticize the experience, as every story inside of us takes different elements. Each one of us has a unique voice. I myself felt the same way having experienced a childhood of Tamaulipecan magic— of rain, of morning, and midnight fires, of the river that merges in the ocean.  

The truth is, the system failed, shut down and prioritized selfish interests over community. Fire and warmth is what remained in the darkness.

Our attention is always so plugged into the electric currents of the system and to me it is undeniable that we need to reconsider how we interact with nature and technology around us. The technology of the system will always invest in the rich and white. 

But fire and community belong to each and every one of us. Fire apart from its symbolic power, is what inspires this essay and leads into the following discourse. 

Under capitalism, we do not observe the elements or even the weather. Our daily lives belong to the harsh reality of work and social structure. It was only through severe weather that it made itself noticeable. Consequently, our families had not been able to work. 

Under the absolute tangibility of material capitalism, our families live paycheck to paycheck. A week out of work, maybe two, meant that they were short on rent. Last Spring, the same thing happened, our families were out of work and struggled to pay rent. Some landlords threatened with eviction. Some of our families, one in specific, is Doña Rosa Amarilla, who told me she was scared that her landlord would raise the rent if they were late because that’s what happened during the pandemic. She said she was really worried and stressed because her family had spent most of the day in their truck and the night inside their apartment, but they didn’t have enough blankets and she stayed up most of the night taking care that her children were warm. 

Another of our mothers, Doña Rosa Roja, from Harris elementary said the same thing: She had stayed up making sure her children were okay. I can tell Doña Rosa Roja is full of ancestral wisdom because when I asked her if she had enough food she said: “I have rice and beans. As long as there is that, there is always enough.” Her statement colors her world in a kind of practicality that is far from capitalistic. Capitalism has transfigured the material into processed toxicity and done so through work, money, and food, a commodified form of "nurture" to which we are addicted.

 

Two years now in a row, we have experienced crises as a community that has resulted in conversations amongst ourselves about the community we are creating. 

I want to call attention to the wisdom that our mothers bring to Cuauhtli and how they impact not only the way our children are raised, but our teachers and ourselves, directly, as well—especially through the consejo between teachers and family members that took place last semester. 

Some of our mothers like Doña Rosa Blanca are widows, divorced, single or possibly in an authoritarian, patriarchal relationship. I am assuming here, because of what I saw in my own community growing up. This is an assumption that also stems from the historical plight of women captured in domestic spaces where their labor is overlooked, unappreciated and not paid—even though this historical relationship has shaped the successes of capitalism. Our mothers are often not only at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy, but they also hold it up. They are the strongest. Not only within a capitalistic structure, but also in ancestral relating. They carry not only life, but memory, time and nurturing. 

When I think of the system collapsing, I think that it has already collapsed atop a structure of hierarchy where black mothers, brown Indigenous mothers and poor mothers are positioned. So when we talk about “failure,” it is really referring to the white middle class experience because the system had already failed us. But because we are forced to find asylum in a country that “shares” some white privileges, we do not notice that the rent is three times as high as what as what we are receiving—and what women have historically received for their labor under colonial capitalism. 

Most of our mothers are immigrants to the United States, not to the land, but to the state. We work here, we live here, we create life here, we give our children to the system, for they system to mold, and ultimately, produce from them, replicate their ideologies, idols and ways of colonial being. We have already paid enough rent for a lifetime, future lifetimes for children who will shape and mold the future. 

Enough is enough. 

My mother always forced my brother to go to school even though he was angry and depressed about it. She did that because she said the government could take us away. Did she value education? Yes, but she was also scared. When we bumped our heads, she was paranoid that the schools would think she was hitting us and that they would take us away from her. Her instinct was absolutely right. Because they were taking us away...from our culture, from our language, from our mothers. 

But now the system knows that Mother Nature is stronger. That beyond climate change, the manifestations of nature are absolutely life-changing and life-sustaining. 

So are our mothers.

Inaugural Essay to a Blog Column authored by Itzel G. Garcia titled, "Weaving Healing in Spaces of Latinx Vulnerability"

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Itzel Guadalupe Garcia, 25 years old, an original thinker and gifted writer, published author, educator, and healer from the U.S.-Mexico border of South Texas and Tamaulipas. She has a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and currently works as program coordinator for Academia Cuauhtli/Cuauhtli Academy, a language and cultural revitalization Saturday school in Austin, Texas.

Itzel has performed her poetry, short stories, and astrological-spiritual theories around academic and community spaces from Austin to Corpus Christi, to the U.S.-Mexico border, and Mexico City. In the current context of COVID and pejorative anti-Latina/o  rhetoric, policies, and politics, this column helps to fulfill her dream of weaving healing in spaces of Latinx vulnerability. 

Hence the title of her series to this blog is "Weaving Healing in Spaces of Latinx Vulnerability." Her introductory essay below is titled, "A Historical Moment of Dream Remembering: Returning Education to Rootedness." 

I am confident that you will enjoy her writings as much as we all do at Academia Cuauhtli.  Bienvenida!  Welcome, Itzel! Your soulful, powerful voice, poetry, and prose are much needed for our Latinx youth, and youth of color, generally, in these trying times.

-Angela Valenzuela

A Historical Moment of Dream Remembering: Returning Education to Rootedness

by

Itzel Guadalupe Garcia

    

      In the midst of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic, I return to the border to be with my family after they were violently sacked from our home in Ejido San Francisco, an agricultural community in Tamaulipas, Mexico. This is my historical moment as the U.S. is also impacted by the virus, by climate change, government, police and structural racist violence. Returning to Tamaulipas and being able to help my family after criminal violence returns me to my purpose as an educator, writer and healer. 

      I define historical moment as dualistic and holistic. Dualistic because it brings both death and creation. And holistic because it is frozen in time, collectively felt, experienced, perceived, analyzed, and processed by everyone and is thusly, irrevocable, altering the course of history. 

    In its life-creating phase, a historical moment has the power to influence the patterns of an era. It is historical because it exists in the Future; that is we have the capacity to accept change and let it shape the future in powerful ways. History is given a human status of remembering within the collective stories we are repeating to each other every day, they affect not only the core values of a society and groups of people, but also manifestations, creations by the individual and collective. The intentions are monumental. History is the creation of a collective dream. 

      So what dream are we dreaming? But one of Death. A dream where George Floyd is murdered, where Breonna Taylor is not only murdered but completely deceived from justice even after death, where immigrant women experience hysterectomies in the hands of ICE, a dream where the system is no longer sustainable emotionally, environmentally, financially, or psychologically. In its “deathening” phases, destruction—facing up to loss and a virus that is a reminiscent of the continuous relationship to ego and fear we experience in a capitalistic community, and social-institutional structures. At this point, element and individual have bounded with all that is public and political: environment and politics, both falling, both incinerating. 

      Despite this, within her own creation of life, death leads to rebirth, to creativity, and to life. This essay argues the potential to shift the historical paradigm through redefining our own historical moment, our roots, home and personal history. 

      I grew up in the elements, in la tierra, la siembra, el rio y el sol. Every morning, we would get up at sunrise. The sun would rise by our bedroom window where I slept with my grandmother and grandfather and set in our garden. The Moon would make her journey contrary to the Sun, starting from our garden and ending in our sleep. I knew the changes of the seasons meant different cycles for la siembra, for the crops, for the labor, where my great-grandfather and my grandfather would grow maiz, sorgo and calabazas. This was the wisdom that surrounded and educated who I was, Itzel. 

      As a young girl empath, I loved my community and the rhythms of nature and nurturing my community was teaching me. But within my community, I observed a need, which developed into a dream. I saw my community needed to resources and therefore needed a good school. There was a school. And I loved it in theory. I loved my teachers and wrote them letters. I occupied the first place in my class, and often held the Mexican flag when we practiced la escolta. I remember playing teacher under my grandmother’s orange trees. 

      But I wasn’t interested in math, and history seemed unsatisfactory. I was interested in creating stories, drawing paper goddesses and revealing in the imaginary senses. I realized that a school where children could be free and happy would radically transform my community.

      With time and through oppression, I forgot my dream. It remained hidden from me until adulthood. My desires had transformed as I moved through an American capitalist-education. I went from loving my community school, to a gringo fourth-grade class where I felt different from other children, inferior for not speaking English. I didn’t belong; so I competed twice as hard. 

      Until I found myself in Austin, studying journalism because I was discouraged from everything that gave me pleasure: Literature, Law, Justice. I graduated without pleasure, I didn’t even attend my own graduation. I was aware I was the first person and woman from my family who had graduated from a university, but I did not care. I was busy pursuing a romantic relationship that broke all of my senses, my mind, my spirit. 

      It wasn’t until 2016, that I applied for a position as a teaching artist with Creative Action, an after-school, non-profit organization. I didn’t know what else to do with my diploma. And this was like giving myself permission to learn what it is I had forgotten. That I loved school and childhood and creativity. It also didn’t matter that I had a diploma. I didn’t want to be anything in the world—but a teaching artist. I didn’t know what a teaching artist needed to be. 

      Teaching Artist was the first evolution of my childhood dream, but I would quickly move into further understanding of myself with Academia Cuauhtli. In the beginning of 2020, I was hired as program coordinator for Academia Cuauhtli—this was the official start of my historical moment.

      Cuauhtli would teach me that the roles of teachers, families, academics, community leaders, children and indigenous elders could all bloom every Saturday, a grand ritual being passed down. Every Saturday a historical moment for me. Every Saturday, the Sun rising to noon, the Eagle flying, gaining perspective, the ancestor returning with memories and gifts of the past, of what could be brought back from the dead. 

      This idea—that the dead, children and memory were intercepted had appeared in one of my dreams. In my dream, I was a teacher for a group of students. One of them asked me, “Ms. Itzel, why do you teach us so much about the dead?” And I replied that children were the bridge between the dead and the living. They are the many histories transmuting, remembering, planting seeds and intentions for the future of the ancestors, of the world. I was teaching children how to recover their ancestral memory by communicating with the dead/ dead energies. 

      At a time, where COVID19 has killed millions of people all over the world, and affected families, communities, nations, things I’m not even accounting for, but especially the way COVID19 has affected the Earth and the ancestors, too—there is a need that will become a dream. The need to grief, to learn to change, to learn that death can be symbol for outer and inner death. 

      Cuauhtli has especially taught me the tools of empowerment that can be replicated to foster space and nurturing to our past ancestors: radical and conscious education. Not just for children—but for the community. The role of the teacher becomes overburdened if the parents/family/society of the child are teaching the opposite values and opinions. Similarly, school becomes oppressive when it is not expressing the familial and cultural values of the student.  When these two forces contradict each other, when education no longer services the Future, it has lost its path. 

      In the year 2020, returning home is both holistic and dualistic, between the inner self and our outer environment, community and political structure. I offer these childhood dreams and ideas that have remained dormant within me for years. There is hope in transforming education to service not only the minds of children, but the past and history through the homes and families of our children. I don’t just think this is symbolism, but the radical notion that life may exist for 500 years more and what will survive should be the best of us so that it has the most hopeful potential of thriving.

Itzel G. Garcia email: itzelgarci135@gmail.com

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