Dear Doña Felicitas Mendez,

I recently discovered about your struggle with the Westminster School District. I am so sorry that you have to deal with the inconvenience and embarrassment of having to take legal recourse against an institution that does not welcome your child. You shouldn’t even have to deal with the injustice and emotional grievance of having to go to court about this inexcusable behavior.

I found out about the state trial deliberations where an Orange County superintendent used to justify the segregation of Mexican children. He declared, “Mexicans are inferior in personal hygiene, ability, and in their economic outlook.” He further stated that Mexican student’s lack of English prevented them from learning Mother Goose rhymes. Poet and author of Borderlands Dr. Gloria Anzaldua said “Attack on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor [is] a violation of the First Amendment,” and I agree. He also mentioned stereotypes about hygiene deficiencies, like lice, impetigo, tuberculosis, and generally dirty hands, neck, face and ears. To me, this is ridiculous because he probably forgot to look at his ugly face and the history of illness in his “people” whether it’s Euro-American or another group he identifies himself with.

Do you enjoy poetry? If I could provide a response, I would say the following: “Illness granted me a set of experience otherwise unobtainable. It liberated me from the routines which would have delievered me, unchallenged and unchaged, to discreet death…The experience has also ratified my conviction that I, and therefore you, are unequivocally physical constructs, if spectacularly complicated ones,” from The Tiger’s Eye by Inga Clendinnen.

Beautiful don’t you think? I thought of how much I hurt and how broken I feel at times. This is how I think you might be feeling at hearing accusations that you are not good enough, that you are inferior. I never thought there was something wrong with me until someone pointed it out to me or made me aware of it. Just because you are of Mexican descent does not mean you are less human, or less “American” whatever that is, why should we allow people to dehumanize us? And more importantly dehumanize the people we love the most, our children?! Some people say we are overreacting, that I am being too political but it’s not like we choose our reality. Historically speaking, we are still dealing with the psychological colonization and imperialism of the U.S. "The US-Mexico border," Gloria Anzaldua says, "is where the third world grates against the first and bleeds."

Although this seems extremely political and I do not want to take away from its political message, I would like to offer a different interpretation that also exists within the message. What if she was talking about that which is most personal in our lives like our relationships and family? What if the third world was a metaphor for the “other” and that which is foreign to us? And the first world is the known and identified? What happens when something strange is in the presence of something that should be natural? Naturally, we bleed and hurt because our first world self fears the unfamiliar. As a woman of color you will encounter backlash and a lot of hurt because our culture is unfamiliar you’re your courage. Gloria Anzaldua calls this Cultural Tyranny, when our beliefs are transmitted through our culture, unchallenged. Culture is made by men and women are suppose to transmit them, not question them. So, stay strong you are doing the right thing.

In Laura Perez’s Chicana Art: The politics of spiritual and aesthetic altarities, the concept of altarity is a good way of conceptualizing your struggle. Place them on the altar, whatever that may be whether its public opinion, the court system, or privacy of your home. So as to remind us all of our material relationships with our ultimate identites of the socially and culturally foreign or third-world. You are Mexican and you are American, yet never would you have envisioned your struggle to have been a Chicana experience since you might not even identify yourself as one. Yet solidarity doesn’t have to be based on identity politics, truth is justice knows no racial or political boundaries.

These Euro-Americans are afraid of syncretism, myscegenation and tainting their purity with our so-called impurity. Yet don’t believe their fears and anxiety, all they are afraid of is seeing you succeed. Our experience is one of consciousness, we don’t plan to be political activists and scrutinized for our actions it just the way it is. In Buddhism, it is the practice of mundfulness, a sense of interrelatedness of self and other that heals either psychic and cultural fragmentation. This experience is part of the Chicana experience.

How is it that we can defend ourselves when we are being attacked based on being othered or foreign? How is it that we can be of Mexican descent, a born and naturalized American citizen but still be lacking in cultural citizenship?! Dr. Perez comments with: “the fear and discomfort within one’s own skin that are the hallmark of the trauma of colonization, reinforced even today in the related aftereffects of everyday racist experiences.” The politics of the dispossession of Mexicans living in the Mexican northwestern states is also the politics of the dispossesion of the space of our bodies. How is it that they can attack our bodies by claiming we are lacking in hygiene and health?! I didn’t know being born Mexican-American automatically made me dirty, I thought it was not showering. The language used is the technology used to colonize, oppress and dehumanize us.

“Tlilli, Tlapalli,” the red and black ink used for painting on codices by the ancient Aztecs. These two colors symbolized writing and wisdom. And only through metaphor and symbol could poetry and truth communicate with the divine. You have provided the red ink with your struggle, I shall provide the black ink with my letter and together we will create a codice for justice. Do not worry, you have friends and allies to help you in your struggle and journey. I will share your story with the world. The story of a Chicana activist! Godbless.

Best Regards,

Luis Arevalo