Publications Thus far:

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The real power is collective…

there, the survivor emerges to insist on a future, 

a vision, yes, born out of what is dark and female. 

The feminist movement must be a movement of such survivors, 

a movement with a future.

--Cherríe Moraga, 

“La Güera” from Loving in the War Years, 1979.

 In September of 2016, four newfound comadres organized the first-annual Chingona Fest at La Botanica in San Antonio, Texas. Later, we discovered that a Chingona Fest had taken place in 2011 in the Río Grande Valley of Texas, and that the following month, another Chingona Fest would be happening in California. This only confirmed to us the fact that something was brewing, chingonas were thinking the same things at the same time.

 The goals of the two-day festival in San Antonio were trifold: to celebrate what it means to be part of a chingona sisterhood, to explore ways to sustain ourselves in this day and age, and to reconnect with the wisdom and tenacity of our ancestors. As one of the four organizers, I sought to zero-in on ways Chicanas, chingonas y comadres can lift up and be lit up by nuestra cultura, our culture that cures.

 It all started with an Instagram post. Five years ago, I realized a decades-long dream of becoming an all-vinyl, self-sustaining, independent and mobile DJ. This dream, conceived in late-night, smoke and booze-infused living room listening parties with longlost childhood friends, has clear-cut steeping stones to fruition. The collection of records I inherited from my dead father, along with my mother’s stack of records I saved from being given to charity when I was a teenager, comprised the base of my vinyl record obsession. Flea markets, garage sales, thrift stores were always places to thumb through dusty crates of the almost-defunct vinyl discs. 

 The daydreaming and night-scheming with my equally music-obsessed comadres became a little more real when my first husband bought me my first turntables and mixer. I’d practice transitions and mixing after teaching middle school all day, taking my own advice and not giving up on what seemed like an impossible dream.

 The last step was choosing a DJ name. Sandra Cisneros had recently, finally released her epic novel Caramelo. There on its pages a word jumped out at me, and along with it memories of my great-grandmother combing my difficult-to-comb curls, and she’d yell or sigh or soothe me with the word that meant unkempt, messy-headed, tangled: despeinada. 

 There it was. DJ Despeinada. I liked the alliteration and all the syllables. I liked how it signified something more than hair: the tangles of my musical roots, how they were firmly rooted on both sides of the border. 

 Looking back, I am convinced that naming myself DJ Despeinada, a good five years before I ever placed the needle to the record in public, was a premonition of sorts, a first-step in a series of reclaiming: words, music, dress, food. My own Chicana cultural awakening. Look at me then, as now: blooming in the borderlands. 

 Fast forward eighty some-odd (!) DJ gigs later. Serendipity, several solid DJ mentors, and a home-away-from-home bar called Saluté, led me to my first paid gig at the legendary Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in the corazón del Westside of San Anto.

 I became a lady DJ in a mostly-macho field, spinning vinyl for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. It took balls, but I was never scared. I knew music, I knew mood, I knew nuances and what it took to inspire people to move, think, feel. When I joined Instagram a few years later, @despeinadastyles became a place to document my DJ work. From my set-up, to astounding album covers, local labels, and obscure liner notes, to the curated outfits I chose to wear at every gig, 

  Instagram was the perfect place to share and follow likeminded people I would never know otherwise. 

 I knew Cristina Martinez from the local arts/craft vendor scene. She was the brains behind the highly popular @VeryThat, “your one stop Chicana shop,” handmade accessories and object d’art proclaiming words like chingona, puta, nalgona, degraciada, chiflada, necia, and gorda. Cristina was one of the first successful “local locas” to reclaim these words that have been hurled as insults to control, oppress, and shame women for centuries. In her signature cursive script, she made the words look beautiful, and in effect diffused their negative connotations. Her work helped us see that these descriptors also held positive power. 

 In the early summer of 2016, I posted a picture from the previous night’s DJ gig. A photographer caught me in action, flipping a record in a vintage teal vaquera dress with multicolored beaded fringe. Rebel Mariposa, a woman I’d never met, hearted the picture and commented: “You should DJ at Botanica someday!” 

 I knew @rebelmariposa as the owner and chef at La Botanica, the only place left on the St. Marys Strip that I could tolerate after its newfangled gentrifi-makeover, after having babies, and after being burned by some scenesters I thought were my friends several years back.

 Cristina @verythat must’ve liked the idea, because she commented straight away: “Yes. Let’s plan something! #metiche” That made me laugh, another old palabra that used to mean nosey, but now could mean more like jumping into something on purpose with the intent to help, build, create.

 And that’s how our Chingona Fest was conceived . Instagram, where metiches meet, brought us together. At our first meeting, Cristina confided that she’d hatched the event name years back and was waiting patiently for the right people, the right time, the right space. We all agreed on the name immediately.  We all sensed a certain magic in the air, and saw the festival as a way of celebrating how far women of color had come. By highlighting chingona musicians, artists, writers, and DJs, we could reinvigorate our spirits as we all continued down the paths our ancestors forged. 

 At our first planning meeting, we wrote down words like celebration, party, plática, baile, honoring, storytelling, vortex. Sitting at a picnic table on the Botanica patio, planners and notes spread out with lists and ideas, Rebel spied Denise Hernández behind the bar, and she asked her to sit with us. I followed @deniseylosdinos and from her posts I gleaned that Denise Hernández was an amazing combination of twenty-something social media-savvy Xicana and activist San Anto old soul. In March 2016, Denise presented at TEDx San Antonio on implicit biases, political identities, the histories uncovered by discovering identities, and fighting oppression. The youngest of the four, Denise took on the task of organizing the workshops and talks at the two-day festival.  Her primary goal was a build a space where chingonitas would be empowered to build on in the future.

 Denise sat down and completed the four: hardcore chingona comadres hellbent on creating something beautiful. 

 I always go back to books. When my own Chicana reawakening started, I was a teenager devouring Cisneros, Castillo, and Tafolla. In my twenties, I got my hands on This Bridge Called My Back and Borderlands/La Frontera. I can safely say that nothing was the same after Gloria Anzaldúa. Nothing is coincidence. 

 While we were planning Chingona Fest, I was immersed in reading the works of second-wave feminists. Post world wars, post Beat-Gen, women activists of the sixties and seventies worked to crack open the door of equality. The white feminists worked to dismantle double standards in the workplace and fought for reproductive rights, while feminists of color saw their own challenges layered with the aftershocks of colonialism and racism that never went away. 

 “Chingona is a term that signifies power,” writes Anita Tijerina Revilla, “a ‘bad-ass’ or strong woman…some feel like the root word ‘chingar’ which translates into ‘to fuck’ continues to signify patriarchal notions of power” (90). We were expecting some forms of backlash, so it is not surprising that most, if not all, of the negative feedback stemmed from the use of the word chingona. “OMG. Why y’all using a cursing word for this event? I love the objective and would love to bring my daughter to the festival,” wrote Monica P. on the Facebook event page, “I just can’t handle hearing this word.” 

 All in all, though, the festival went off without a hitch. Two days of workshops with topics such as: Decolonizing Sisterhood, Equity in Texas Public Schools, RAICES Families in Detention Centers, The Lilith Fund for Reproductive Justice, along with two nights of music, comedy, and dance performances. We gave out chingona awards to celebrate mujeres making a difference in our communities, and Cristina curated a market of chingona vendors to highlight the magic of alternative economies.

 I put out an open call for lady DJs asking women who had always dreamed of spinning records for an audience to step up and do the thing they always wanted to do. All in all, six “baby” DJs performed for the first time that night. They got their DJ names on the flier and leapt over the first-gig hump. In addition, members of the all-girl collective Chulita Vinyl Club spun their hearts out. I provided my equipment and set the parameters (all vinyl, all chingona power anthems), but that night I didn’t spin a single record. It wasn’t about me or Cristina or Rebel or Denise. The point was to get people together, inspire and empower them, celebrate the chingona and encourage her to shine.    

 Chingona Fest is over, and the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election looms darkly over all of us. The purpose and process of this paper can never be “just a paper” based on “just what happened.” Though I cannot help but tie in the work of Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, and Maxine Hong Kingston as I was diving into their works for a presentation that landed around the time of the election, I must also seek relief from crippling sadness and fear of the end of the world.

 Learning the word biomythology was more than a lightbulb moment for me. More like a lightning strike. In her 1983 autobiography Loving in the War Years, Moraga seems to speak directly to me as in this passage from the essay “A Long Line of Vendidas.”

 When we name this bond among Raza women, from this Chicana feminism emerges. For too   many years, we have acted as if we held a secret pact with one another never to acknowledge   directly our commitment to one another. Never to admit the fact that we count on one another   first. We were never to recognize this in the face of el hombre. But this is what being a Chicana   feminist means--- making bold and political the love of our women (129).

Chingona Fest was, and will continue to be exactly this: a safe space to declare our love for each other in all the ways humans can love. Moraga continues: 

Possibly the words of one Latina to another will come closer to the cultural/female connection I   am trying to describe: There is something I feel for you or with you that I experience with no   one else, that I need and crave, that I never get enough of, that I do not understand, that I am missing at this very moment…perhaps it’s spiritual openness, two souls touching, love that   transcends the boundaries of materiality, ordinary reality and living (Mirtha   Quintanales, unpublished letter) (129).

Truth be told, I was a taken aback a few years ago when I noticed the word “chingona” bobbing up both online, on artwork, and on the lips of young Xicanas. In my own experience, the word connoted both negative and positive energies. 

 As usual, I immediately posed my questions to my mother. Though born a mere seventeen years before me, my mother Ilza was raised in the Río Grande Valley in those AM-only radio, black and white television, pre-Internet days when kids were safe to play outside all day and trained to listen for their mothers’ particular whistle which meant the sun was setting and it was time to come inside.   

My mother’s wild childhood consisted of riding horses through her suburban neighborhood, traipsing back and forth across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas into Matamoros, México, riding bikes, walking around barefooted, and being crowned the tetherball champion of her elementary school. Her teenage years were equal parts fun and chaos. She and my father sang those late seventies bordertown blues driving to the beach, passing a joint back and forth with the windows down.

 These mixed roots comprised my early childhood on the border. I spoke English when we lived in Texas, and forgot it all and learned Spanish when we lived in Tamaulipas. Sesame Street and Sábado Gigante, Michael Jackson and Ramon Ayala.

 I often wonder how I’d have turned out if my mother had not chosen to uproot herself, and by extension, my sister and I from the tip o’ Tex all the way north to the big city of San Antonio. In San Anto, my Spanish got rusty and my English got polished in the posh Northside schools where my mother somehow found a way to send us. 

 My friends were mostly fellow apartment girls, undocumented and first generation, with a handful of suburban military necias whose houses seemed so spacious, so modern, so American.  All that to say, I was raised by a chingona who was raised by a chingona who was raised by, you guessed it, another chingona.      

“Ilza es bien chingona!” her primos would declare, as if to say, “Our girl cousin don’t take no shit!” “No seas tán chingona,” her father would reprimand, as he’d try to get her to see things his way. “Te crees bien chingona,” my father might tease, as if to thaw her icy defiance.

 What were these men trying to say when they called her a chingona? It was a word hurled with a curve of a compliment and the rattle of a snake. Dangerous, these chingonas who maybe let others walk on them (no te dejes) once, but rose like smoke from seemingly extinguished embers. 

 To raise two daughters with no husband in a sprawling city where shadows hid the worst, Ilza made a way, always, to pay the rent, keep the lights on, feed her kids and their friends, and when it comes down to it, prepare them for the world outside the apartment complex.

 “Chingao!” we’d exclaim when we were thrilled over some cool revelation, or when we were pissed at some minor or major travesty, when we stubbed a toe or made a mistake. “Chingón” meant massive and masculine, “chingos” meant a lot, and “chingada” meant fucked literally or figuratively. Looking back, I strain to see why “chingona” was such a rare bird of a word for my particular group of ‘90’s bilinguals. 

 To dissect the roots of chingona, I do what all Xicanas do when reaching back for meaning: I revisited Octavio Paz and his chapter in Labyrinth of Solitude entitled “The Sons of Malinche.” I’m always going back, circling around the idea of history and how it intersects with truth, myth, and wishful thinking. There are ghosts that haunt us, I truly believe, because they are trying to tell us something:

 History, then, can clarify the origins of many of our phantasms, but it cannot dissipate them. We  must confront them ourselves…history helps us understand certain traits of our character,   provided we are capable of isolating and defining them beforehand. (73).   I view Paz like an old-school tío. Part of me reveres what he has to say, and the other part of me reviles it. Tracing the history of “chingona” is so deeply rooted with the conquest and patriarchy, yet I agree with the idea that: in our daily language there is a group of words that are prohibited, secret, without clear meanings. We confide the expression of our most brutal or subtle emotions and reactions to   their magical ambiguities…They constitute a secret language like those of children, poetry, and sects. Each letter and syllable has a double life, at once luminous and obscure, that reveals and   hides us…They are the bad words, the only living language in a world of anemic vocables. They   are poetry in the reach of everyone (74).

Chingona. Say it loud, and it is a curse. Whisper it, and it becomes a prayer. A chingona refutes the myth of Malinche, the traitor/sell-out/whore who single-handedly led to the downfall of our indigenous ancestors. La Chingada who literally fucked us over by helping Cortés, though the word chingar “probably comes from the Aztecs: chingaste (lees, residue, sediment) is xinachtli (garden seed) or xinaxtli (fermented maguey juice)” (Paz 75).

 Etymology has always fascinated me, but Paz pisses me off when he goes on to blame and blaspheme Malinche:

She is the Chingada. She loses her name; she is no one; she disappears into nothingness; she is Nothingness. And yet she is the cruel incarnation of the feminine condition. If the Chingada is a   representation of the violated Mother, it is appropriate to associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation, not only in the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women. The symbol of this violation is doña Malinche, the mistress of Cortés (86).

 How on earth can a brown woman be vilified for the actions of a white man? Whether or not she was sold to Cortés, her role as “la chingada” pales in comparison to the “chingón” actions of a conqueror.  The word “chingona” does not appear in The Labyrinth of Solitude.

When “chingona” starting bobbing up online in the early 2000’s, in artwork, and on t-shirts, most of us chalked it up to Sandra. Patron santa of bookworm Chicanitas, Cisneros, with her knack for digging up an ancient concepts and polishing them bright for all of us to behold, wove the concept into speeches. 

The following is a list culled from the notes of her devoted audiences: 

 How to Be a Chingona in 10 Easy Steps

 1. Live for your own approval. Center yourself. Be alone. Create your own   space.

 2. Discover your own powers. What floods you with joy?

 3. Find true humility and practice it.

 4. Keep your palabra, your word.

 5. What are you using to cover or mask your pain? Address it.

 6. Your only true possessions are your actions

 7. Seek forgiveness.

 8. Live in the present moment.

 9. Depression has a purpose if you use it before it uses you. Transform it to   light. Compost it   through art. If you can’t do it by yourself, see a professional curandera (healer, therapist)

 10. Listen to your body.

 Whether or not the four of us had these objectives in mind when were conceived and created Chingona Fest SA, TX, it seems now that years of reading (internalizing words of our Xingona foremothers) and working (as teachers, organizers, artistas, entrepreneurs) had poised our intentions to land on the same page. 

Sandra’s ten steps break down all the ways we can break through centuries of oppression. Rewriting stories and reclaiming language is only the beginning. 

 Chingona Fest could not have happened without a safe and sacred community space in which to contain it. La Botánica is a vegan restaurant, bar, and music venue located in the corazón of the St. Mary’s Strip on the northern edge of downtown San Antonio. The brainchild of Rebel Mariposa, Botánica is a hub for all that is queer and brown and proud in an area of town that is rapidly gentrifying. A self-proclaimed “artivist,” Rebel followed her desire to create art and curate in the kitchen. She veganized family recipes and started catering. 

Within a few years, she opened La Botánica, Texas’s first vegan restaurant and full bar, with the help of investors and a successful Kickstarter campaign. 

Rebel is a force of nature. Her energy made the festival possible, and she creates a space that represents what Clarrissa Pinkola-Estés deems "the wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish territory, to   find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can" (12)

 In the vast jungles of the Internet, social media makes it possible for one to find, for better or worse, their tribe. It happened to me later than most. Born too late to be pegged Generation X, I was in my early teens when Nirvana broke. I carefully clacked away on a Smith Corona with a high-tech white-out option, and remember the cyber-hum of dial-up internet.

 Yet, I’m too old to be a millennial. Cellphones were a thing of my twenties, and I didn’t join Facebook until 2007. From the start I was wary of friending strangers, and remember responding to friend requests with private messages: Do I know you?

 Enter Instagram. If life is a series of lessons that lead to a series of realizations that lead to bookended reinventions, then IG was a reaffirmation that I was not alone, we were not alone, and we were never going back. I followed accounts of local women I knew superficially, but their posts made me love them, and as a consequence myself, much deeper. 

Again, Moraga speaks to us from the tail-end of the second wave: 

Within the women’s movement, the connections among women of different backgrounds and   sexual orientations have been fragile, at best. I think this phenomena is indicative of our failure   to seriously address some very frightening questions: How have I internalized my own   oppression? How have I oppressed? Instead, we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry. Even the   word ‘oppression’ has lost its power. We need a new language, better words that can more   closely describe women’s fear of, and resistance to one another, words that will not always   come our sounding like dogma (46).    

Moraga taps into the power of comadres who harness the power of language in the sacred spaces afforded to women: “the words and rhythms that were closest to me: the sounds of my mother and aunts gossiping—half in English, half in Spanish—while drinking cerveza in the kitchen” (47). This code-switching chisme is the lifeblood of our survival. Who but other women to relay our truths? Who but a circle of comadres with whom to build the future?

 One week after 11/09/16, I sat at a picnic table with the Chingona organizers. I burned palo santo, and we all took turns crying. What does this election mean for our future? How will we protect our babies? What are ways in which we can slow down the gentrification of our inner city barrios? Where will we meet up is communication gets cut off? I try not to get hysterical. I tell them about my plan like  a butterfly with her fragile little caterpillars she must protect at all costs. “Your daughters are our seeds,” Rebel declares. “And we will do everything to make sure they are safe.”

 These thoughts have clouded my thoughts even in the most carefree of days. Whether planted by dystopian literature, zombie apocalypse propaganda, or some ancient thread in our DNA, I know I’m not the only one who has fully expected the end of the world.  What was European colonization in the Americas but an apocalypse, anyway? How was slavery anything short of the end of the world? 

 Now, more that ever, it is the wisdom of our elders and the stories of our own matriarchal ancestors who never had the luxury of even uttering the word feminista that will get us through. 

 Gloria Anzaldúa talking to us como una “luz en lo oscuro.” Cherríe Moraga reaching out to her followers on Facebook. Alice Walker posting on her website. People making memes of Audre Lorde excerpts. A group chat between Cristina, Rebel, Denise and me named “Chingona Comadres (floating hearts emoji)” in which we send each other screenshots of beautiful and terrible things. Where we nudge each other onward, where we crack jokes and dismantle chisme. 

 These chingonas, our chingonas. We chingonas be chingona.

WORKS CITED  

Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. South End Press:   Massachusetts, 2000. Print.  

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Grove Press: New York, 1961.   Print. 

Pinkola-Estés, Clarissa. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman   Archetype. Ballatine Books: New York, 1992. Print. 

Revilla, Anita Tijerina. “Muxerista Pedagogy: Raza Womyn Teaching Social Justice through Student   Activism.” The High School Journal, vol. 87, no. 4, 2004, pp. 80–94.   

www.jstor.org/stable/40364286. Web.

Roth, Benita. Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in   America’s Second Wave. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004. Web. 

www.alvaradofrazier.com/2011/12/10/how-to-be-a-chingona-in-ten-easy-steps-sandra-cisneros/