What was it like to grow up in the South Bay and how did your upbringing lead you towards community work?

I’m from Gilroy, born and raised. My kids are actually 5th generations Gilroyians. My mom is a grassroots organizer in Gilroy. My dad was an organizer in prison. He went to prison for a long time. He was privileged to work with Eldredge Cleaver and other Black Power organizers in the prison. Together, they brought in English as a Second Language classes, general education classes, trades — they brought in speakers from different universities to San Quentin. He was in there for a long time, and he did a lot of good work while he was there. Once he got out of prison, he became addicted to drugs but he always taught us about the importance of political theory and being in community. He had a lot of reading time. My mom is very pragmatic, very practical, very powerful in the community, and very well loved. She’s not afraid of anything. I have a lot of love and respect for her in the work that she does. She’s 75 — she’ll be 76 — and she’s a force. My mama is a force to be reckoned with.

How did you start organizing your own campaigns?

I don’t think I had a choice! In high school, I got involved with organizing my freshmen year when the first war in Iraq happened. I organized with my fellow students, did a walkout, and we were confronted. It was the worst. It was so reflective of Gilroy. We were confronted by hundreds of pro-military, pro-war guys, who accosted us and got us into a corner. They took our signs and started throwing things at us. For a good hour, we were under attack. There were a dozen of us. That really made me aware of how dangerous organizing can be and how passionate the other side could be.

We organized bigger and better for the next walkout that was against a Zero Tolerance Policy when I was in high school. My friends and family were being targeted to draw down money from the state to combat gang violence. What it really was doing was to get money to militarize our police department, and to place our friends and fellow students in these off campus programs where they could get probation officers and cops on them at all times even though many of them didn’t have discipline problems. If you had a problem being tardy, you were transferred out. They were placing many kids into these pop-up schools that the County and State were funding. That was a big problem, so we organized a second walkout when I was in high school around that time. I got arrested for that one because I had just turned 18. High school was where I started to mobilize my fellow students and community.

We won good things out of it the second time. We won a Mexican American History class, a Literature Class, and a section in the library of books dedicated to Chicano history. I had to do a lot of community service hours for that one though, around 200! But I also got confronted by white supremacists from the John Birch Society when I was doing a forum about the war. I was 15 and they tried to accost me. My parents were in the parking lot, and it was at the end of the night. It was at the church and we just did a debate about the war and a bunch of toothless white dudes surrounded me and tried to get me outside. My dad came out with guns blazing (not with real guns) and he just came in and they scattered. It was no joke. Gilroy is not like San José. We have the John Birch Society, and we have militia members. In Morgan Hill, we have the KKK. We have a very active South County Patriots — that’s their cover for being Tea Party members who organize themselves and are right here just below the surface.

How do you deal with such a large presence of hate groups in South Santa Clara County?

I think as a Gilroyian, I just learn to expect it from the Tea Party. We’ve always known they’ve been there. They always sent newsletters to the library. Now they just seem to be more normalized. They seem to be more like people you see everyday. They don’t look like backwoods militia members. Now, they look like middle class white ladies who work for our mayor, host coffees for him, and host voter registration tables. That’s what they look like. They’re very normalized. They were ready for Trump to win, for this tide to turn to come out of their rock and look like presentable people.

How do you think Gilroy has grown in terms of activism and political consciousness?

I’m really proud that we’ve had marches in Gilroy led by students and teachers. We’ve joined forces with Morgan Hill to have the South County resistance that popped up after the January 20th Trump Inauguration. I’m proud. I’m not involved enough in it because I’m in San José so much. I’m really honored it happened. It’s really the light at the end of the tunnel to be honest. Our City Council reflects a more conservative side of the community, but the gentrification of Gilroy has brought more diversity. Gilroy’s always been Mexican and White and now there’s a sprinkling of Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino. It’s much more diverse now now that we have all these immigrants coming in and being a part of the community.

The housing crisis and renting prices have skyrocketed, but our schools are much more diverse and my kids are exposed to diverse people. I don’t have to go to San José to eat or to meet people beyond people who are not Mexican and White.

What led you to your current position at SEIU?

When I did my community service hours for the walkout, I was 18. They hired me at Mexican American Community Service Agency (MACSA) and we had a Gilroy Youth Center. They ended up hiring me, and I worked there for about six years. While I was working there, my coworkers and myself were abused. A lot of nonprofit workers ended up getting “martyr syndrome,” and managers took advantage of it. They don’t pay you well despite having money from the grants. We ended up calling the union and we called SEIU because other non profits were organized by them. We organized our non-profit to have a union and we had 86% of staff voted for the union.

As soon as we negotiated our first contract, SEIU recruited me to work for them, and I was very happy to do that because MACSA, despite it’s name, showed me the hypocritical side of the Chicano movement and nonprofits. There were pictures of Cesar Chavez everywhere but did they live up to his legacy. Did they honor the rights of workers? No, they didn’t, so I was happy to organize them and win better pay, benefits, and rights for my coworkers. But ultimately, if you have happy employees who can go to school and have education leave, then you have a base in the community to help the children and families we were helping. That was something I was really proud of.

From there, I was working at SEIU Local 17, which is now Local 521. I was there for ten years. It’s hard work, and it was great work. I got to work with health care workers who were taking care of the elderly, disabled, and children in their own homes. I was lucky enough to be a part of that negotiation — one of the highest paid contracts is Santa Clara County and San Mateo County. The best benefits bar none in the whole country were home care workers. They deserve much more, but Santa Clara County, we treat them pretty good. We do. They fight hard. They’re really proud union members. It’s an honor to work with them for so long.

What have been some challenges and victories for you in organizing your community?

The challenge is having my kiddos and a husband. I neglect Gilroy, and my own community. Evenings and weekends are either with my kids or my community and so, I drag them with me and make them do stuff like make posters. They all can chant really well. Sometimes they enjoy it, and sometimes they don’t. That’s the challenging part — pretending you don’t have a job when you’re a mom, and pretending you’re not a mom while at work. It’s a juggling act.

I’m sure for all working parents that’s the challenge but ultimately, it’s for them. They sometimes make me tear up and tell me something really profound and beautiful about my work. Sometimes they say, turn your phone off, Mom, or turn the computer off.

How did running for Gilroy City Council impact you in terms of your growth?

I learned in running for City Council that I have a lot of work to do on myself. Voter registration and surveying my community, going door to door, that’s on going — my whole life I’ve been doing that. My neighborhood knows me, but the folks who are the newcomers to Gilroy, there’s a lot of outreach you need to do. I needed to bridge that better.

I should have had a better campaign manager because I know how to run a campaign and I’ve worked on campaigns since I was little, since I was in first grade. I learned that there are different standards for Chicanas running for City Council than a white guy to be running for City Council. One of our sitting council members went to prison for selling and manufacturing methamphetamines, but he’s a white man, and now he’s a business owner. He’s easily elected every term. Our mayor, as horrible as it is to mention, had a young woman die of alcohol poisoning in his house after she was drinking with his daughter. Horrible thing I had to mention, but it’s very real. I had a ticket for talking on my cellphone and I got slammed in the newspaper for that right before the election. I also had a bankruptcy from when I was 21. I was working for a non profit and I was a single mom. I was slammed in the news, but we have a sitting meth dealer.

What dreams do you have for Gilroy?

First and foremost, district elections. We still have at-large elections. We’re one of the last communities in the state with the population demographics we have that do not have district elections. We have a coalition to make that happen.

I would also love to see equal distribution of our resources. The east side can be safer in terms of the infrastructure and recreation facilities that we invest in. We have one-nineteenth of parks that the westside has and that’s being generous. In all honesty, the numbers are much worst. We don’t have the facilities for our youth. I dream that kids on the east side could learn how to swim in a pool, have accessible recreation, and have things to keep them busy and smart not just in the summer time but all year round.

How do you think Gilroy has contributed to the history of South Bay?

We do have a really rich history, the Myers Milias Brown Act came out of Gilroy and our representatives. Of course our agriculture, I mean the lovely smell of garlic and chile and tomatoes every summer. Cesar Chavez was very active in our community and inspired people like my mom to do so much. I know San José residents think Gilroy is just another part of the county, but Gilroy is a gem. We don’t look like the rest of the Silicon Valley but we’re definitely passionate, heart filled people. Now, San José is spilling over to Gilroy, but we need to maintain our character. We don’t want to blend in. We want to be a positive influence. We’re very “hometown-y” and old fashioned. There are still horses on the street and tractors, but I love that. I love being exposed to that and my kids being exposed to that. In San José, I love being here too and being able to transfer the progress and ideas and possibilities a little further south.

How would you like to continue growing as an organizer?

I think there are people in the community who are way better than I am at self care and at feminism. I need to become a stronger feminist.

What does that mean to you?

My daughter didn’t know a woman could be president until she was 8 years old. That’s my failure. She should have been knowing that. I never make the conscious decision to be a proud feminist. I know my mom as a Chicana activist was always torn between being a feminist and being a Chicana, and I was influenced by that for a long time. I think my dad was more feminist than my mom. During my MeCHA meetings when I got frustrated with the guys, my dad would say, “Tell those guys to check their sombreros at the door.” He wouldn’t let me do the domestic stuff and it’s never been my strength any way. He would say, “No my daughter is not doing that if my sons are not doing that.” He was just very progressive.

I didn’t run with that as strongly as I should have. It was always again of being a Chicana or a feminist. It’s not a question for me any more, it’s both. I need my girls and my sons to know that and embrace that.

What are some words of wisdom you’ve gained from your life of activism?

I think everyone should be active in their community. They should do what they’re passionate about and organize their communities so that we can come to a space and place where it’s no longer a question of you’re this or that, Chicana or feminist, you’re LGBTQIA or not. It’s just us. It sounds cheesy but we have to work towards it. I’m really proud of my kid’s generation — my 19 year old, 13 year old, and my little one. They are not homophobic at all and my generation really was, and my mom’s generation still is. My kids are so fluid with their gender and sexuality, and they keep telling me so much about it. When their friends come over, I ask, is that a girl or a boy and they say, that’s just a person. I’m learning so much from them and it really gives me hope. It’s really wonderful.

Rebeca Armendariz: Building Community Power in Gilroy was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was it like growing up here in San José?

Before San José, I was actually born in Louisiana. I remember it a little bit; going to school there and how the kids were different than in San José. When I moved here at the age of nine, I saw people of Latin descent and Asian descent for the first time. It was awesome because Louisiana is just African American people, Native American people, and European or Caucasian people — that’s all they had there at the time. It’s changed since then, but when I got here, I heard languages other than English being spoken for the first time and it absolutely blew my mind. I knew that a part of life had been sorely missing and I found that right away, like, “Wow, these kids are speaking to each other in something that is not English!”

Things were different then, you know. There was no internet to find out stuff like that. So, growing up here in San José was very diverse. It was one of the most wonderfully diverse places that I had ever been in my short little life! People were so open, so willing to share. So many people I grew up with were born here, at O’Connor Hospital, at Kaiser Santa Teresa, at Kaiser Santa Clara, they were born here. They knew all about the things that make San José great, and I grew up in that environment. It was really wonderful to just explore, and watch it change over time. When I was growing up, riding the light rail through downtown was [different, it was] not the downtown that we see today.

What have been some changes you’ve seen in San José since you’ve been here?

San José has this thing now where we’re building up. If you go right now to Campbell, to Willow Glen, to Saratoga, to Cupertino, and you see their downtowns — you won’t see one single building over four stories tall. All of San José used to be like that.

While growing up here, how did you gravitate towards dance and art?

It’s funny. San José was always a place of art. I always had friends who drew or painted, but for me, I never grew up in dance. I used to read. I was huge on being a bookworm and learning that way. My parents were kind of strict so I didn’t get to go out a lot. I had to read to find out about the world around me and I had to talk to my friends in San José who were out there and we would explore a little bit. I did a lot of reading. It wasn’t until I was an adult in my thirties that I started doing dance. So that’s why I do what I do, too. I know that you don’t have to start dancing when you’re five. I never started until I reached adulthood.

I was spared — in my eyes — of the competitiveness of that scene. I got to learn freely and I got to love dance and grow at my own pace without the pressure of being compared to other dancers, or without the pressure of being the “best.” I’m a peace dancer, y’know? After that, I started getting tutors and going to classes and getting a formal dance education, but it was only after I started doing it on my own. And San José had contributed to that in a way that — in San José, anything is possible. That is our mindset. It’s not like that in Louisiana. It’s not like that in other places. In San José, you can do anything, you can be anything; all you have to do is be willing to learn, and practice, and do and be that thing, and own that thing. It’s part of the culture here: create. Creating is what we’re all about, and I don’t think there would be a Dance of Peace if it wasn’t for San José. I certainly wouldn’t have done that in my little hometown in Louisiana, where everybody’s watching.

How did the Dance of Peace come about?

I was going through a time of searching– not knowing my purpose, not knowing why life was unfolding as it was. I tried to take control harder and harder — “I’m ambitious, I’m driven, this is how I see myself, this is what I wanna be.” But all the work that I was doing, all my efforts, didn’t fill up a place inside that needed to be more and to do something that helped other people. So I just had to take it to the universe, How can I really make an impact in these ways that would make people happy?

People are stressed so I kept getting shown this kind of “Dance of Peace” by the universe, and I would see myself dancing. I would see myself interacting with people in these wonderful ways with friendliness. I would see myself going all over San José and all over the Bay Area and the nation, and the world, doing this dance of peace. I saw that and I was like, “No… no… I can’t do that…” At first, I was very resistant to what I was seeing and feeling and being shown, even though it was this beautiful vision. I had this thing inside of me, like a lot of us do, to remain anonymous. I don’t want to be in the public eye. I don’t wanna be a person who someone looks at and actually questions their sanity — I don’t want that person to be me. That’s what I had inside of me and the universe kept showing me that.

After a few years, it was actually harder not to do it. It actually hurt me more not to do it, knowing that I had this dream inside of me that I was saying “no” to because I didn’t want to be seen in a certain light. Finally I was able to step out and just say“You know what, I’m gonna try it.” And it evolved from there. It does have a mission, and that is, peace in every heart. Peace in every heart. When I’m out there dancing, I’m thinking about that energy of peace; I’m channeling that energy of peace. It comes from a source that’s already there, it’s already inside of us. It’s just up to us to share it, to put it out there in a way that is accessible to people, that they can see.

They’re gonna think their own things, they’re gonna feel their own things, and some people might feel resistance to it like I did in the beginning. It’s definitely gonna cause a response within and the goal is peace in every heart, and we all have potential for that. When we have peace inside, we can start to create peace in our world. We can start that dialogue that says, it is possible — despite any circumstances that we may see, we know that peace is the way. We know that’s what we want our children to thrive in, we know that that’s what we want ourselves to thrive in. Our world is gonna grow in these ways, and we’ve been down the path of destruction. I think we’re a little bored of it. I think we’re a little tired of it. I think the violence is getting slightly old, I think people are like, “I’m over it!” So we need more and more ways to work at peace, more and more outlets– and it’s endless.

How have people reacted to the Dance of Peace?

I remember when I first started, I definitely had expectations. I had to let go, and let it be what it is. If I’m really channeling peace, peace has no expectations. Peace is it’s own source of joy and life in these certain ways, so some of the reactions I get are really positive. I got super spoiled from people who are so loving and so friendly and so grateful — literally strangers coming up and saying, “Thank you for doing this, thank you for doing something that we can all see that lifts our spirits.”

Then of course you have the other side of the coin where people actually think it’s improper for a woman to be seeking attention in these ways or actually get really angry because when they see happiness, it offends them. Only a fool would be happy in the circumstances that we’re in, but we choose the circumstances that we focus on. All these problems that we have as a society are real, but so is our ability to create anything we want. It’s just as real as the problems. What are we choosing to focus on? I am surprised sometimes by people who get hung up on technique, it actually offends them to freestyle and mix styles — they take it really personally. It’s funny to see the different reactions that it causes.

Some people laugh, and if the Dance of Peace makes someone laugh, my job is done. Laughter is a beautiful medicine, it massages the internal organs; it’s very good for us. If people are laughing, that’s perfect! [laughs] That’s a release. So, I get a lot of various reactions, of curiosity, or you know, the shyness comes out of people. I’m always surprised at that– people are really shy. They would rather ignore something sometimes, than acknowledge something that makes them feel uncomfortable, or even that makes them feel emotional, on any level. They would rather walk away from that and pretend that it’s not in front of their eyes. They would rather not see it.

How do you see the Dance of Peace growing? Do you envision classes or a school?

That’s a big part of it! Actually it is a class, and I want everyone to come. We’ve been doing the class for about two years now at San José Peace and Justice Center. The other ways that it’s growing is a book called The Peace Dancer, it’s a children’s book. I’m working on a book for adults to explore these concepts of peace within their own minds. I present peace in a way that is all the things that peace really is to me — it’s practical, it’s magical, it’s an everyday thing we can work on to interact with each other and ourselves better. It’s a tool to end the mental conflicts daily, and the mental conflict is real. I’m working on a book for adults for that. I’d love to see the children’s book be a part of regular curriculum.

One of my visions for the Dance of Peace is to have lots of people that do the Dance of Peace. If we had a peace dancer on every street, it would change our world in a beautiful way. Part of my original vision for it was to have so many people that it shakes the ground! And that everybody knows, “You know what I’m gonna do today? I’m gonna go do some dance of peace today because I feel like I need to contribute in a way that everybody knows that they can contribute in this way.” To never have to try to keep it for myself, but to have everybody know that it’s open to everybody everywhere. All you have to do is feel that, and it’s a practice. So I see it growing by going everywhere, and just getting to meet more and more people. It’s a column on Silicon Valley DeBug, and I write about my experiences — my beautiful experiences out there; or challenging experiences — whatever the case may be — I write about it. I write about my personal perspective, the things people say — it’s fascinating.

How do you see peace growing in San José?

Actually, San José is ahead of the curb when it comes to peace. The only thing that we as a city need to work on is a little bit more inclusivity. We’re pretty exclusive here, and pretty affluent here. We have so much of the best of everything, that it almost blinds us. We’re almost blind to those who maybe don’t have as much. I’ve seen people disenfranchise citizens; they are almost invisible — it’s almost as if they don’t exist. I would love for San José to be the city that says, “If you’re in San José, you’re one of us. It doesn’t matter if you’re up here or down here — can we just acknowledge each other?” And I would love for peace to be the method to eliminate a lot of the fears that we have for our disenfranchised citizens.

If we could be strong as a city — different factions of the city, not like us against Google or like us against people that are coming in from different countries to take our jobs — forget that. It’s us now. If you’re here, you’re on our side. San José can rise above every other city in the Bay Area, or in the nation, by being one. And I believe in that more than anything, I believe that more and more people in San José are starting to be like, “Yeah, y’know what, this is our city, let’s make it awesome.”

Do you have any words of wisdom for people who are artists or dancers ?

Go for it. Really super go for it. When I started doing the Dance of Peace, I used to spend my days calling people, calling places, and asking if I could do the Dance of Peace at their establishment. I would hear back, “Oh yeah, we’ll get back to you, email us at this address. Call me in six weeks and I’ll let you know.” No. Go do it. Don’t wait for anything. We have no time to wait, especially when it comes to urgent matters. Things that I consider urgent like peace, art, collaborating with others — those things are important. It can’t wait. Don’t wait for anything.

Khalilah Ramirez: Dancing for Peace was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was it like growing up in San José as a young Filipina?

When I was growing up here, I grew up in an apartment on the north side of town near the airport. We moved when I was six which was when my dad passed away. We moved to a house a couple of blocks away with my auntie, uncle, cousin, and his grandma and grandpa. There were a lot of people, and we moved there during a time when there was still farmland — it was public land where my mom and auntie would go and pick certain edible flowers. That land is now the new Kaiser Permanente Skyport campus.

It was a very San José thing to see the Silicon Valley burst out of the Valley of the Heart’s Delight. Growing up in San José, I went to a lot of schools that were mostly Latino. I felt like I was constantly searching for things that were Filipino, whether it be friends, teachers, books or even songs. Thankfully, during that time, there was a lot of Filipino R&B on the radio.I was looking for things to belong to, and I didn’t know where to look because the only things that were Filipino were my music and my family. It was more observing and learning about how to be Filipino.

The first time I was able to really find books about being Pinay and growing up Filipino was when I finally got access to the Internet in my home; I think this was in 1998 or 1999. I had the freedom to search what I wanted to learn about the world. I was looking up Filipino books or Filipino American books. This was when eBay was the most popular marketplace seller that I knew about. I looked up books on eBay and I had to bid on them. I was bidding for Growing up Filipino which is edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Then, I got this book that was about an Alaskan family but they had Filipino roots. It was a novel, and I wanted to read it just because it had something Filipino in it. And then, I didn’t know this at the time, but I had also purchased one or two books that were anthropological texts. There was a lot of distance in reading those kinds of narratives. One text was called Understanding the Filipino, which was clearly written by a white male author. I strangely connected to it because it taught me some things that I didn’t know or didn’t think about. I didn’t have the opportunity to learn those things unless I read them in a book. That journey to look for the right book still influences me [in terms of] what it was like to grow up here.

What changes have you seen in San José?

There’s been so much change. Some of the things that I cherish and remember about San José are not here anymore. Some of the things I remember about certain places are suddenly filled with more popular things. For example, here in Japantown, I used to come here when I was little and there used to a lot of Japanese American owned businesses mostly by first or second generation immigrants. I like now that there are a lot of young entrepreneurs here. I think the part that bothers me is that there’s so much housing around here which capitalizes on the ethnic enclaves, immigrant work, and the affinity to be near another part of the city center. There’s a visible change.

There are more white folks walking the streets. It’s hard not to think of that while walking the streets, while also taking up space in the businesses, and then the lines get longer, and then the prices of everyday things get higher. That’s really hard for me to see, because as a writer, I’ve been able to travel around the country and see different costs of living. It almost becomes a point of respite that I can buy a five dollar salmon sandwich in Milwaukee.

I’ve seen a lot of things change — a lot of Filipino restaurants that hella mark my memory are not here anymore, either in Milpitas or in the east side of San Jose. My memories are marked by what is erased or absent or can’t be here anymore.

I know that when my stepdad first came to the U.S., he immigrated here in 1998, he wanted to open a restaurant, but it was too expensive even then for new immigrants to come and do that. He just kind of gave up on that and instead cooks a lot at home. I really empathize and feel for those sort of everyday personal interactions, charged with decisions that people make to maneuver their lives around what doesn’t include them, or what once did but no longer does. Sometimes, it is based on a feeling. Sometimes, it is based on one simple interaction. Those are the things that I don’t want to forget. For me it’s a drastic change. It’s kind of uncomfortable to be in this place where I was able to live before, but now Big Tech has brought a lot of people here who don’t care about what was here before them. I think that’s a huge problem.

What led you to storytelling and how do you connect storytelling with activism?

I wanted a diary when I was six. It doesn’t escape me that that was when my dad passed away. Even at a young age, I knew that I wanted to say something or grieve something or be able to have something to say when I’m asked. I wanted a diary, so my mom took me to Sanrio at Eastridge Mall to get it. I just wanted write. My dad passed away during a time when I was still learning how to write and how to form letters and words and how to write cursive. I wanted more time to do it outside of the classroom because I thought it was the most fun. It’s fun and joy and grief and expression, all at the same time. I like that writing could be that.

Whenever I found a blank book, I’d write in it, and I still have some of those diaries today. I would just write things, that now as an adult, I think are trivial, but back then, they were super important. I wrote about a boy that I really liked in middle school but nobody knew. I wrote about what happened in school that day. I didn’t know how to share that with my family, and my brother is two years older than me. At that time, two years feels like twenty years. I felt like my brother wouldn’t understand me, and my mom was always tired from work. My diary was the person I could talk to.

When I was in college, I realized that I needed to figure out what I wanted to learn because I didn’t have a major. During my first year, I majored in sociology — I didn’t know that I could study people of color. I [then] changed my major to Ethnic Studies. A lot of the emphasis was on counter narratives and telling people’s stories. I would read stories that were so specific to certain ethnic groups. A lot of that was what became my first book, microchips for millions.

If anything, my writing, just like activism, teaches me there’s not a lot of time. There’s not a lot of time either because you’re busy or [you] fill your schedule. Even with the time that I do spend wanting to put things together — books, events, people — even that time is not as meaningful as it could be all the time. Writing and activism can come together and they could be separate. I’m okay with either one as long as I declare when one is the other.

How did “microchips for millions” come about and how do you address your own trauma and the trauma of your mother while she was working in a silicon chip factory?

What I want to make clear about the traumas that are addressed in the book is that I kind of feel like it’s trauma from when I was younger. [It is a trauma] of absence, not so much the injustice of what the microchip industry does to its people in terms of toxifying their work environment. The trauma was my mom leaving when I was younger and the trauma for a lot of these women who don’t know what may come in terms of their medical help later on, that their health might be deteriorating because of their environment. There’s potential for trauma.

When I was writing the book, and even now when I talk about it, I think of trauma as severe, hella deep, and deep seated. For me, it’s not going to work every day. When I was writing it, I wasn’t writing out of a place of trauma more than I was writing to get away from the loss or the potential loss of my mom. Finding what could be fatal in her environment scares me, and it makes me worried because I don’t want to go through losing another parent. For me, that is what I would say is the trauma that’s underlying the book. When I was writing it I actually felt like I was writing more from a place of freedom. There’s something really satisfying for me about documentary poetics. Documentary poetics, much like documentary film and non-fiction, writes about real world struggle. It doesn’t really focus on the solution because I think that that’s not the work of the people who have the problems all the time. Documentary poetics has allowed me to pull what I know from so many different sources, or DocPo, as we call it. It pulls from scholarship, it pulls from headlines, it pulls from formal and informal interviews, and it pulls from observations. I think all of those things are what make up my poetry in my book. There will be references to scholarship, to literature around how toxic Silicon Valley, and to my informal conversations with my mom.

Writing the book, I wanted to be very careful about how I present my mom as a character in the book. People will feel a lot of pity for my mom or they’ll feel a lot of pity for me, which I understand. Pity is a [part] of the book, but I don’t want the work to rest there. I would want the pity to move into action or move into reading more (I think reading more is another action actually.) I would want people to see how poetry could be this vehicle to learn more about the world.

The very first poem I wrote for the book was in 2008. I was a student at UC San Diego. I had known that I wanted to write about the microchip industry because I still take issue with the name, Silicon Valley. I knew I wanted to write about it. At the time, there was a visiting scholar from the Philippines. His name was Dr. Neil Garcia. He studied literature and he was a visiting scholar and he worked with Dr. John D. Blanco who was serving as an advisor for most of the Filipino students. So he brought Neil Garcia, and as a send off, they wanted to do a reading for him. Neil read some of his work, and they needed students to read, too, so they asked me to read because they wanted female writer to read. It was a very small reading but I’m glad I got to read this little thing about the Silicon Valley. I remember that being the start of it.

I really started to work on microchips in graduate school for my documentary poetics class. Everybody had to write or recreate a chapbook that was anywhere from eight to twenty pages. I thought “microchips for millions” was just going to be a chapbook. It ended up being so much more. The reason why I decided to pursue it as a book was because I remember feeling something was wrong about the feedback I received. For me, I felt that maybe the work wasn’t where it needed to be before workshop. That was the first time I where I submitted work that was not just personal for me, but also for my family. I think that’s why the stakes are higher, and I decided, OK, I need to write about the Silicon Valley.

Then, I moved home and I remember going to the Mission in San Francisco where I used to party, and go clubbing with my friends. The Mission used to be mostly brown people in 2010. I moved back here in 2013, and I remember walking behind this family that was looking through the window of an art gallery, and they said, this used to be a taqueria. I was like, whoa, I am feeling the same sense of displacement I was writing about, from something I thought that happened more slowly.

Even though I didn’t live there, my friends and I decided that we were going to patronize these businesses. I think it was really tough. Just to see the changes in the Bay Area made me want to write microchips.

How did you come to learn more about Filipino-American history and activism, and how do you incorporate your Filipina, or Pinay, identity in your storytelling?

When I was in college, my friends and I organized a directed group studies course, which was led by students on Pinayism because we all wanted to read the Pinay Power, a Peminist Critical Theory book. We all wanted to read it, and we found a mentor who was willing to sponsor the class. After reading the book, I kept thinking, wow, I really feel seen, and I can relate to this on a new level. My friends and I organized the class, and we did a lot of work that [surrounds] what I still strive for, which is uplifting the consciousness of people and getting people to sit down and create art even if it’s just writing a sentence or doodling.

I was also doing undergrad research that related to Filipino history. At UC San Diego, I was a part of the McNair program. In McNair, you choose your own research project. I wanted to learn more about the struggles of first generation Filipino-American students. I changed my research topic to Filipino American high school students after-school spaces. I noticed that at Great Mall, here in Milpitas, that a lot of Filipino American students gathered at the movie theater after school on a Friday afternoon. When I lived in San Diego, I lived in a very Filipino neighborhood Mira Mesa, also known as Manila Mesa. I moved there and noticed that a lot of high school students would gather at the neighborhood movie theater, too. I wanted to study this Friday afternoon phenomenon of mostly Filipino students. In that research project, I was able to learn about Filipinos gaining citizenship through the Navy; San Diego is a navy town. A lot of Filipinos moved to Mira Mesa because of the suburbs and moving closer to the Marine Corps Air Base, which is outlined with a lot of furniture stores. That’s literally how a lot of Filipinos got to build their home in Mira Mesa, that was the origin.

I also learned that the movie theater space was made to be a place of surveillance. I was taking Urban Studies courses and I learned that when there are no benches in a space, that means they don’t want you to sit, nor do they want you to stay for a long time. There were two benches for the entire movie theater quad. I learned about how urban design tells you what to do in the space — it tells you where you can go or where you can’t go. That’s why there are those clamps on benches or there are like a lot of dividers on benches so that people can’t sleep there, so people can’t skateboard there. A lot of the inventions around urban spaces are anti-homelessness and anti youth. That’s the same thing that I detected with the movie theater space where they only hired security for Friday night. They knew that youth would mostly gather there on Fridays, and they hired security to watch them. It was a heavily policed space.

I also learned what the youth do to resist; a lot of the students resisted by continuing to skate over the clamp, and by having dance battles, and ciphers outside of the quad. They treated it like a high school without supervision. And because of that project, I had to learn on my own. I had to look at Youth Studies, American Studies, and Urban Studies and all three of those fields contributed to my literature review and then that sort of became my avenue for documentary poetics and writing poetry. I still feel like I do research in many ways but a lot of people don’t think poets do research but we do hella research. Because I had to read all of that work on my own, that’s the same approach I take to writing poetry.

I actually wasn’t actively writing poetry at that time of my research project. I had a friend whose honors thesis was about Asian American poetry, and we both really loved the work of Ruby Veridiano. She was a part of an arts collective called iLL-Literacy that came out of UC Davis. Her work really inspired me to write because she was writing about anti-miscegenation and interracial dating. She was able to attach concepts of Ethnic Studies into poetry. I realized I wanted to do that with my writing, too, and I read a lot of books because of it.

I then became the first social media intern for the first Filipino American International Book Festival in 2011. That’s when I became familiar with PAWA, Philippine American Writers and Artists. I didn’t know that six years later they would be my publisher. I really believe in that community pipeline. I hope people know why I chose to publish microchips with a small Filipino press. It’s purposeful. I super wanted to do that because I know that it won’t be my last. I want people to know that when they look at my career, they’ll see that all of the decisions I made were super intentional to support the Filipino American literary community.

It was through my experience being an intern for the FilBookFest, that I was in a room with all of these Filipino American authors. Abe Ignacio, who wrote the Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War in Cartoons, was there. Mitchell Yangson was there — he used to be the Filipino American expert librarian at San Francisco Public Library. I was so floored to be around them. Gemma Nemenzo was my supervisor for the Book Fest–she ran Filipinas Magazine, which ended in the early 2000s, and now she runs Positively Filipino. She wrote one of the blurbs for microchips.

Being in that room with people [was amazing.] That’s when I realized who they were, and which people I had to read. That made me want to keep going. I learned so much from those people about how Filipino storytelling has been vital to the survival here in the U.S., even to survival in the Philippines, because a lot of them came during a time of Martial Law, during a time when they weren’t supposed to be writing anything.

Filipino and Filipino American writing is actively writing back and then documenting everything that’s problematic, which I think is exactly where my work falls. FilBookFest was where I learned about the balagtasan, when Dr. Joi Barrios came in and she gave this workshop on why the Filipino American International Book Fest should have a balagtasan completely in Tagalog. Then Dr. Penelope Flores — she was part of the organizing committee — would talk to me in Tagalog, and I would just guess what she was saying to me because I only knew Ilokano. Thank God I was correct every time. I was able to understand, but their collective presence taught me humility. It doesn’t come out of the shame of Filipino culture but just coming out of being together. There’s something really special about that.

What dreams do you have for San José?

I would like for the poetry organizations here to have more money and funding so they could bring more authors here. A lot of authors either come to San Francisco or Oakland, especially if they’re community artists. That’s where more people are. There are also documented and visible traditions of writers there. But there have always been amazing writers here, too.

I would want for there to be a space, more of a known and accessible space dedicated to the arts. I hope other people see how poetry can be a way to address and be a part of different struggles. I also secretly want to open the Filipino Community Center over here on Fifth Street as more than just a hall for rent. I would like that to be place of organizing and community.

What are your words of wisdom for artists, writers, and storytellers?

Read and write the same book over and over again at different parts of your life. Something to emphasize for myself is creating your own pipeline, and it doesn’t have to come from other poets. Read authors, and see what they’ve been through. Maybe figure out where they are teaching, or where they live, or how can you meet them — what conferences are they attending, at what festivals will they be presenting? Talk to them for advice. Also, I want to emphasize the importance of figuring out your own shit.

Last week, I was at a reading of a friend and she responded to a writer in the audience who asked about how to sustain a writing practice — she said, you’re already a writer. Most people already are, and they just don’t have the time or the push or the person to say, hey you need to do this. Young poets have to be that for themselves and each other first.

I think my advice should be simpler. My mom always has the most simple advice and it always works. She always says, do your best, which is so true and so simple. I think that’s what I would want people to take from this.

Janice Sapigao: Writing on the Filipina and San José Experience was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was it like to be grow up as a Muslim woman in your community and how has your experience shaped the work you do now?

In much of my time growing up, I was the only visible Muslim. As a result of people’s curiosity and the bullying I experienced, I understood that I had an opportunity and a privilege to speak out and help people understand who I am, what my faith community believes in, and to also use that privilege to advocate for justice for my community and others.

There’s something to be said to be the only girl in 5th grade to wear a headscarf and to have that headscarf pulled off but to also know how I respond in the moment, though I should have the space to hurt and to heal, also shapes how people see me. If I am the first interaction they have had with a Muslim woman in twenty years, what I do matters even more.

That’s something that I carried with me as I went through high school and college when 9/11 happened.

I’ve always felt this weight of my privilege as an American. I was actually at the Faith in Action Bay Area rally at the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, and one of the religious leaders said that collectively we haven’t done enough. That’s something that I think keeps me going — this idea of I have so much and I don’t know if I have done enough.

What motivated you to become a civil rights lawyer and a community organizer?

As a kid, I talked a lot and was really argumentative. People steered me towards law as a career, and it fit. But I don’t know if I came around the issues of racial justice and social justice and immigrant rights immediately — that took time. One of my earliest moments of self-correction, or learning, was around a conversation I had with a student government leader while I was in college when tuition hikes were going up. I remember thinking, “Eh, what’s another $100? It’s fine. My parents will write the check.” I actually think I said those exact words. I recoil every time I tell that story but I recount it so people know that people can change. At the time, I was a teenager in my first year of college — to go from that to organizing mock graduations at the State Capitol steps of Sacramento took a lot of support from friends, learning, holding myself accountable, and being willing to be challenged. It was the work for college access and voter engagement as well as a post 9/11 reality for Muslims that ensured that I would take my privilege and my law degree and put it to use for the communities that are most impacted.

What have been some challenges and victories you have experienced throughout your social justice journey?

I came to CAIR first in college as an intern, and one of my earliest tasks was looking at the security watch list that people were just starting to experience and talk about in 2004. They were going to the airport and having trouble flying. I stayed in touch with the organization after my internship, and when I graduated law school, I was grateful for the opportunity to join this office as an Acting Director. A year later, I took on the role of Executive Director.

Over the years, the challenges have included the usual non-profit challenges which are: do we have enough money? Can we pay the bills? Are our computers running? Which office will we be in? Those kinds of things.

But I would say that the substantive challenges we’ve faced have been in some ways unique to doing what some would deem controversial civil rights work. Arguably, I wouldn’t call it controversial civil rights work, but many would, but controversial civil rights work for a targeted community at a very difficult time. We’ve had to think about informants not just in our community, but also in our staff. We’ve had to think about the physical safety of our team members, whether it is fear following the fake anthrax that was mailed to our office or protesters showing outside at other CAIR office events. Our team has been through self defense trainings.

There’s a concern that when people are doing this work they are both making the sacrifices that every person who works at a non-profit makes but also putting their lives on the line. Having to think about that, we worry a lot about whether or not we are staying true to our mandate. Are we working towards the best interests of our members of our community? One of the ways that we ensure that is that we spend a lot of time in the community. We spend a lot of time in the community talking to impacted people so we don’t get numb in our offices working to serve them.

I would say that our victories — victories are interesting because we are in this very long intergenerational fight against structural racism in this country. For us, we see Islamophobia as one part of the broader structure of white supremacy that is at the core of this country’s foundation. When I think of victories, I am clear that they are progress, but they should not come at the expense of another community.

We’re not at a place to say that the fight is done. When the Muslim Ban was first signed, it was incredible to work with partners and allies to mobilize thousands of people to go to the airports and protest and support those protesters and all the people that were stuck in detention and in airports. [It was amazing] to get elected officials to compete to see who could be more visible for their support for the Muslim community. I would say that’s been a really big [victory.]

Over the years, it’s been really important that we, out of this office, sued Abercrombie and Fitch for religious discrimination and won that case and forced them to change their policy so that they were then required to provide accommodations for people wearing religious head coverings. Last year, when anti-Muslim activists said that they would come to a number of cities across the country, we were really surprised that they were coming to Santa Clara. When they did, we worked with our partners at People Acting in Community Together and Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice and organized a rally that had people mobilize at, I believe, a 100:1 ratio. The anti-Muslim activists mobilized 20 people, and we had over 1000. There are days like that where we know when we work hard and we work with the right people and we have the right values in place, we can accomplish progress, but we want to be thoughtful about seeing that progress as steps forward in a larger effort.

What was the process like in filing a lawsuit against Trump’s Executive Orders, and how did you build people power from that process?

CAIR National filed one of the first lawsuits against the Trump administration. The litigation was called Sarsour v. Trump. It brought together a number of American Muslim activists and leaders to challenge the Trump administration’s targeting of the Muslim community through the Muslim Ban. It was one of two of the organization’s lawsuits and part of our broader campaign around the Muslim Ban. Our attorneys have been on notice since December 2015 that come January 2017, if this person was in office, he would try to target our community in this way. We knew and we had committed more than a year in advance. We would fight them with every tool in our tool box.

With that said, people have asked if it’s scary or controversial to sue the president. I remember wondering if this is the right lawsuit, is this the right timing, how do we do this really well, but I wasn’t worried about how scared I was or that he could do anything to me. I knew, as a US citizen, I had a privilege by virtue of where I was born, which was not something that I did or earn, but just literally where my parents were that made it possible for me to challenge this president in a way that my siblings, who are siblings in the broader sense, who are undocumented, couldn’t, or who aren’t US citizens couldn’t. I had a moral obligation to do so.

We used that litigation and our friend, Linda Sarsour, was the named lead plaintiff on that because we knew she had incredible name prominence. It wouldn’t be a stranger suing the government — it was someone that many of us knew, and the same was true for many of us plaintiffs. We were leaders in our communities and so it made it accessible for people to understand. Our partners at Mpower Change put together an amicus brief that had signers from across the country. They used it as a petition gathering opportunity — it’s not a way that I’ve seen petitions used before but that’s what made it impactful. Random people could sign the petition to support the lawsuit against the Trump administration.

For us, we also wanted to be really clear that the fight against the Muslim Ban was not a fight that was restricted to the courts. In my capacity as a director here and for CAIR SFBA, I co-chaired the national No Muslim Ban Ever campaign in partnership with the National Immigration Law Center, an incredible legal group that focuses primarily on serving low-income immigrants of color and does a lot of great litigation including Supreme Court litigation; Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which has a legacy of serving the Asian and Pacific Islander community and connecting the dots between what happened during World War II and what happened post 9/11; and Mpower Change which is a Muslim racial justice digital organizing group to connect litigators to communicators to organizers to ordinary people. Whenever we’ve had major wins in social justice history, it’s never been just about the courts. It’s always been about the protests, the courts, the media, and the people power that’s built. When I say we see this fight as part of a bigger fight, why we don’t want to fight it in just the courts, we want to make sure that we are building the right conversations in the community.

What trends do you see in the San José Muslim community and how do want to see the movement grow in this area?

It’s been really powerful to see Muslims step into their voice and step into their privilege in many cases. It’s been really powerful and incredible to see San José Muslims step into their voices and power and demand that they be treated with dignity and respect and demand that they not be censored or disavowed when they have unpopular things to say particularly on controversial issues. It is through their ownership of their voice that they will build power rather than on a reliance on others to save them or on allies to do their work. I also think that where I have a lot of hope is in all of the post November 2016 election mobilization in particular. I’m excited to see more Muslims who are asking for housing rights and advocating for police accountability, who are challenging us to do more on immigration, and not just Muslim Ban immigration issues but rather asylum and border issues as well. For me, a silver lining of the last year and a half has been saying enough is enough, we’re gonna fight for ourselves and for our neighbors.

What dreams do you have for your community, either regionally or internationally?

Regionally, I am hopeful that the Muslim community will grow as a voice for justice — not just for us, but for everyone. Internationally, it’s almost hard to distinguish the two in some ways because so many of the problems internationally are connected to US foreign policy. Internationally, I pray for the day that Palestine is free and that there is democracy unfettered by US military influence in Muslim majority countries across the world.

What words of wisdom do you have for people interested in your work?

There’s a few different ideas that come to mind — one of them is check on your strong friends. The other is, for me, this isn’t work, this is worship. I see the opportunity to worship in everything that we do, and I invite others to join in purpose driven, social justice efforts. [Lastly], sometimes I have to remind myself that my job isn’t to save people, it’s to serve them.

Zahra Billoo: Suing Presidents and Serving the People was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was it like to grow up in San José and how did your childhood shape your writing?

I grew up in Alum Rock where I lived for the first twenty years of my life. Up until I was a teenager, I don’t think I really left the East Side or Downtown. As a teenager I got really interested in the local punk scene, and going to shows was the first thing that got me to realize that there were all these other pockets of the city that I have never really seen before.

An important detail about how I see the landscape has to do with my family’s history here. My mom’s parents were Azorean immigrants that came here in the first half of the last century and my dad’s family has been here much longer. [His paternal ancestors came] to San José from Mexico in the 1840’s to work in the Almaden Quicksilver mines. So I’ve been hearing people from his family tell old ghost stories and other family stories my whole life.

My grandparents worked in the canneries, my dad worked in the canneries, and my parents picked apricots in the orchards. So I grew up driving around with my dad and hearing him point out the window and say “that used to be an orchard” or “that was a cannery” when I would be seeing strip malls. I was reflecting the other day that it’s strange that the things I mourn in the landscape are not these beautiful things that my dad could see.

I felt really sad when they were tearing down the McDonald’s on Third Street and they were putting in these high rise apartments. It’s like, I never thought would I mourn a McDonalds. In downtown now, businesses that serve a more working class population or people experiencing houselessness are being shuttered. They’re being replaced by Chipotles and fancy gyms. I tie that in my mind to when I was a teenager, they built this big pavilion in downtown San José that had these jewelry stores and clubs and everyone said these things will never last, and they didn’t last. They were only there for a few years and then they closed. But now, fancy businesses catering to the wealthy transplant community are seemingly thriving downtown and that’s really scary to me. I’m scared to see how the East Side is going to change when they bring BART in.

What gravitated you towards storytelling and zine making?

I became interested in riot grrrl and queercore which are types of punk music in the late 90’s. I made my first zine Shy Violet — a split with my high school girlfriend — when I was 16 years old. It was just a way for us to document our own story, things that we were thinking about related to being queer at a Catholic school or learning about feminism, and [we could] control the distribution of that information. I think we made 10 or 15 copies of that first zine and just gave it to our friends, the people who we trusted with that information. One of the empowering things about zine culture is that you control what you say, how you say it, how it’s edited, and who gets to read it. You don’t rely on the sort of same gatekeeper structure that I’ve observed as I had the opportunity to publish my writing in literary journals or when I send out manuscripts to presses. I am really inspired by that idea that people can choose for themselves what they want to share in the world and how they want to share it.

The other forms of writing that I’ve gravitated towards are, as academics would say, lyric essay and documentary poetics — kinds of writing that blends research and poetry. [I document] topics that are rooted in San José’s present and history. I’m drawn to that kind of research-based writing because I like that it’s a slow process that allows me to investigate questions I have about my community and the history of place and then share it back with people who are interested. I am fascinated by who gets to define what is “true” about San Jose, and what words get used to express those facts. I incorporate a lot of academic and journalistic language from newspaper articles, online message boards, films, and other artifacts, as well as my own observations and imaginings in a more poetic voice. I spend a lot of time visiting the sites that I am writing about to soak in their vibes.

How did Cheers from the Wasteland and the South Bay DIY Zine Collective come about?

I had moved to Providence, Rhode Island which has a very vibrant arts scene made up of both locals and transplants who had moved there for one reason or another — it’s very well coordinated. It was so simple to figure out what was going on any given night. It’s very rooted in Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture. A lot of people [were] doing these self-directed community-supported programs. I moved back here and I felt really isolated even though my family is here and all of the markers and landscape make me feel at home. I had a difficult time connecting with other writers and that is what inspired me to start Cheers from the Wasteland.

I thought about Cheers from the Wasteland as the title because I wanted it to be something that celebrated San José — that kind of “cheers” — and a project where people had the opportunity to see for the first time who else was out there — kind of like a “Cheers!” or a “Hello.” I put out a call for submissions. I was not very connected with any writers or artists in San José and I had to push it out as hard as I could. I asked friends to boost it on their social media, and then I started really combing the internet looking for writers and artists from San José. That’s how I found out about local poet and essayist Janice Sapigao, for example. Over time I’ve gotten to know more people. I’ve had community support from co-editors like Erick Saenz and October Montoya. As editors, we try to offer resources to people who are interested, and we get inquiries from artists and writers who say I’ve never submitted before or say, I just do this work privately. We try our best to support folks to say, what can we do to help you feel more comfortable sharing this work. We try to be conscious [about] representation and I’m thinking more about how to reach more local artists and writers outside of my ripple effect, outside of my own circles.

The South Bay DIY Zine Collective (sbDIYzc) started around two years ago. I see it as an ever-expanding group of volunteers—predominantly people of color and queers—who work together to put on free, all-ages community events like San Jose ZineCon. We saw an opportunity to have more structures in place around zinemaking, offer more resources, get out into the community, and let people know that zines are an option that they’re out there. Anyone can do them. You can create them with free and readily available materials. The free workshop series that sbDIYzc founder Poliana Irizarry hosts at the LGBTQ Youth Space has been a really great way for experienced zinesters s to get their faces out there and connect, especially with youth, who I feel are often overlooked as important voices and contributors.

What have been challenges and victories in capturing the stories of San José, a city that is quickly changing and gentrifying?

With the South Bay DIY Zine Collective, the first thing that comes to mind is that we are very committed to having all our events be accessible. All our events are free or sliding scale with no one turned away for lack of funds and open to all ages. There’s a real lack of affordable space to hold events. We’ve been fortunate to host events at Silicon Valley DeBug and at the library. Choosing to partner with local organizations has enabled us to prioritize first time zinesters, folks who wouldn’t pay a $100 tabling fee in another city. Because there’s no tabling fee, they think, I can sign up and it’s low pressure.

At the last zine fest, we created a San José room. We put all the San José zinesters together so folks from San José can say there are people who are in my community who are doing this work. Cheers and sbDIYzc share in this desire to use our resources to raise the visibility of people doing creative work in San José. We hope to enrich the landscape by having these stories out there.

[For instance,] for Summer of Discontent Zine Fest in 2016, I worked on this long zine project documenting the history of St. James Park which I knew a little bit about. The deeper you go into the research, the more people you can reach out to and ask questions. I learned you can’t unsee the things that you uncover once you start researching. Now whenever I see St. James Park, I have all of those stories hanging around in my head. As I read or look at art from other folks who have different perspectives, it continues to enrich my view. What are the concerns of folks who live here especially folks who have roots here? It’s a great concern of mine that a dominant narrative in San José is the Silicon Valley narrative of prosperity and all those bootstrap narratives of people rising the ranks of society. I want folks to know that there’s so much more going on here and so much rich history here.

What were some valuable insights from MOBS: A History of St. James Park, and what led you to create a zine around the park?

I was interested in St. James Park initially for two reasons. One was that I had gone to a poetry reading there that was sponsored by the Downtown Association and some other groups in San José that was about “re-activating” spaces in Downtown that are “underutilized.” I thought, this was not an underutilized space. It’s just not utilized by people with disposable income who the city finds desirable . What does it mean to go into this space and change the dynamic of it? Why can we have a big tent in St. James Park if someone is doing yoga in it, but we can’t have the tent if somebody is in it to escape the heat and relax? Also around that same time, I learned that my grandfather was in the crowd during the 1933 lynching that happened in St. James Park.

I started doing archival research and I got a subscription to the site Newspapers.com. I started combing for stories that were about St. James Park and I found, for example, that St. James Park had been a haven for people experiencing houslessness since the turn of the last century. It’s been a decades-long gathering place. Part of the thing that I noticed in the language about St. James Park is that it’s going down the tubes — it used to be “insert whatever language” and now it’s fallen into disrepair and we have to do something about it. I really question that narrative and I found out that a lot of things have happened in that public space — protests, parades, and two different hangings were there over the years. The first gay pride parade in San José was in the St. James Park. There’s another family story where people that my dad went to high school with at San Jose High School murdered a priest there in 1966. It was a meeting place for queer folks in the 60’s and 70’s. I didn’t know most of that stuff. Prior to that, St. James was just a random park to me in San José where I did Food not Bombs in the 90’s.

How has your own family background impact your writing?

There’s an anchoring nature to my family’s stories. It’s what helps me feel like I’m the right person to position myself to tell the stories that I have to tell about San José as well as the things I’m interested in and investigating. Talking to my family about the stories here is important to me — it’s enriching to my life.

What have been some trends you’ve seen amongst the stories submitted by people with such a deep connection to San José?

There is a real sense among folks who have submitted to Cheers that we’re trying to grasp on to the final bits of something that feels like is slipping away from us. I see folks from San José wanting to document things before they change for good, or wanting to tell their stories both visually and with words of what it’s like to be in a San José that operates outside of tech. I’ve included things from transplants as well in Cheers. I want the magazine to reflect a lot of different voices but to me the priority are folks who are from San José. There’s a certain mournfulness to the way people are experiencing San José right now and an urgency behind wanting to capture the stories that make this place ours.

What dreams do you have for San José and your community of artists and writers?

I want folks to feel like they already have what they need to share their stories. A zine doesn’t have to be highly produced. You don’t have to make 1000 copies of it. You don’t need any gatekeeper stamp of approval to say it’s good or bad. Folks should find their people and support one another. Offer support and seek support. When you see someone doing really good work, especially someone who has ties to San José, lift up what you see and tell your friends about it. Those kinds of gestures are really important to building community in a place where there’s a lot of misinformation such as you need certain credentials to be legit.

I attended this event at the library a couple weeks ago that was a community dialogue around conceptions of home in San José. They asked folks who were from San José to raise their hands and only me and one other person raised their hands. There was 30 people. The conversation didn’t center around the topics I was hoping for, but it made me think about the transplant voice in the arts. My hope for folks who come here from afar, especially folks with money, is that they really think about their imprint in our community and care about finding out the history of this place. There’s really push in San José for the most lauded public art to be art that increases property value. How can we find opportunities outside of these big structures to raise up each other’s work and find community in San José?

What are your words of wisdom to fellow zine-sters, creatives, and writers?

Find people and take risks and start small if it’s overwhelming. If you have an idea for a project, go for it and don’t get tripped up if you stumble at first. It’s hard to put yourself out there, but we need it. We need people who can take risks for our community.

Leslie Patron: Capturing the Stories of A Changing San José was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Describe your own social justice journey and how you first started learning about your identity and political issues impacting you.

I first learned about gender politics at home. [I wondered,] “Why does my brother don’t have to do shit?” He didn’t have to do a lot of domestic work, and I did. He got to go outside, and I didn’t.

I, then, got politicized in crossing the border. I was born here but I moved to Mexico when I was two. I came back when I was five. The first memories of who I am, my identity, was Mexican. I was Spanish speaking and by then, I had already gone through kindergarten, pre-school, and first grade. I was already institutionalized by the Mexican educational system which [focused on] arts and crafts. By then, I was doing whatever art possible. I was doing music and theatre on top of growing up in a rural setting. Moving back, it was like a culture shock. It was like, damn. [People told me,] “You’re actually El Norte. You’re actually a citizen and we’re going back.” I was crushed and I was five.

There was those two dynamics. I [also] got politicized through educational justice. I went from JW Fair Middle School and I was tracked into ESL classes, realizing that I was in classes with teachers with the white savior complex. Going to Hoover Middle School, I actually was assessed and determined that I had to be placed in honors classes. Going from one experience to the other was like, wow.

I got politicized into the community work through getting involved in the Spanish Club my freshmen year at San Jose High Academy. Now, it’s called San Jose High School. My teacher was like, “You want to be president?” my sophomore year, and I was like, sure. At that time, there was an honoring of Cesar Chavez, a one year commemoration of his death. He died in 1993. There was a march being organized downtown, and 10,000 people came through. It was one of the biggest marches in downtown San José. I got involved with that march because my friend made a classroom announcement saying, “Hey everyone, my parents are members of the United Farm Workers (UFW.)” My family was a peasant family in México. I totally connected with [the movement].

Through that classroom announcement, I got invited to this commemoration and other UFW activities at that time considering it was one year since he passed away. He was organizing La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), another organization within UFW that focuses on the organizing of farm workers. UFW focused on labor rights specific to the farm workers. LUPE did the community organizing around educational justice and environmental racism through a faith based model. “Lupe” is short for Guadalupe in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was key for UFW organizing.

From the classroom announcement, getting involved with the Cesar Chavez one-year commemoration, to being president of the Spanish Club, I started organizing cultural activities like school dances, karaoke look a-likes, lunch rallies, to cultural events like Cinco de Mayo. We raised money for scholarships so that people had some money for their college goals. We did a lot around college readiness, and we organized the highest attending school dances on that campus. I was an organizer before I knew it.

It was also 1994 and Prop 187 came about. Everybody was organizing walkouts. I was also getting mentored by the elders of the Chicano movement. There was a gap in intergenerational organizing. The people organizing in the Chicano movement in the 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s allowed for the people in the 80’s to benefit from all the movement organizing on top of the Reaganomics and neoliberal policies that allowed for people to have a house, white fence, and green grass. By the time that Prop 187 hit, it was a new generation of organizers but disconnected from the older generation.

I ended up organizing Sureño gang members and the same girl who gave the classroom announcement organized the Norteños. When it was declared that there was a statewide action of walkouts, we totally walked out. We did it under the principles of the Chicano movement. The law said that state workers — that includes teachers, workers in public services and public health systems — were going to snitch if you were a migrant. If the law had passed, it would say that state workers would have to report anyone who was undocumented. It was very close to what happened in 2006 with HR 4437. So, we hella walked out. I definitely got politicized in that way.

There are all these layers. Here I am with the older generation of Chicano organizers. On the other hand, I’m also developing basic leadership skills through being involved with the club. Then, the political climate was saying, you need to step and be fierce, dear youth. Speak up because your community is being attacked.

After, I went to San Jose State University(SJSU) and tried to navigate college. I was in a weird place because I was the only one that “made it” from my close circle of friends. Many of my friends were first generation migrants, and so, they started working right away because school had failed to prepare us for college or sometimes, their only option was to work.

At SJSU, I ended up getting involved with Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (M.E.Ch.A.) the first year. That first year that I got involved was the final year of the campaign to bring the MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center to San Jose State. So M.E.Ch.A. was a part of other progressive student groups to campaign for a multi-cultural center at San Jose State. I got to witness my previous generation of SJSU classmates make some awesome beautiful magic and leave a legacy for us.

I was part of a community service-learning program for two years. There were over 10 of us. We really developed an intersectional and multi-sectoral group. We were really progressive. I don’t think our professor was ready for how progressive we were. We got politicized together, and together we led the efforts around addressing the 9/11 attacks to the point where we ended organizing the biggest event in the city. We had 3000 people at the vigil we organized. We had a really famous Muslim basketball NBA player come to speak, and there were intersectional speakers. Back then, my major was Public Relations, so I had became the PR person for that work.

We started organizing around homelessness, displacement, gentrification, Ethnic Studies, Filipino issues, I mean, everything! We ended up creating an after school program for homeless children. I created the open mic at San José State that’s still there — the Word Open Mic at the MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center. We did a lot of cultural work. We ended up creating Cafecitos and MECCA nights which took place downtown at Iguana’s for Muslim folks to hold an open mic for themselves.

Joseph Miclette also created Lyrical Discipline, a hip hop open mic. We used to hold Thursday Sessions where we would get together at someone’s house where we would talk about progressive politics while someone DJ’ed. A lot of magic happened during those four to six years there at State. In that cohort of academic service learning, we all became amazing beautiful people who are still contributing somewhere. Vanessa and others created Fifth Element, a woman hip-hop group in San José. Tyson Amir became an Islamic hip hop brother. He traveled around the world doing Islamic Hip Hop who’s now a teacher in the San Francisco jail system. He published a book of poetry called Black Boy Poems. It’s his story of being a black man in San Jose. He’s one of the best lyricists. As soon as I graduated, I started MAIZ San Jose. Maribel Martinez became the first Latina Student Body president of the campus managing a million dollar budget or more. Now, she’s a Director for the Office of LGBTQ Affairs for Santa Clara County. Everybody has done amazing things.

If you believe in magic (I believe in magic), we were meant to meet each other. We continue the work. We push each other. We did amazing things as students, on campus, and in the community. Soon after we graduated, we’re still in the movement.

I think what was really key [was that] I grew up brown, first-generation, and with Spanish speaking music. I grew up sheltered from American pop culture and so going to college was a culture shock. Being in this intersectional group allowed me to expand and see the connections of how we both struggled together and make shit happen. [I saw] how our communities contribute to the social fabric of what we now know as America.

I had the idea of MAIZ when I was actually heavily involved with the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants (PAWIS.) It used to be known as Filipino Community Support (FOCUS) with Mara Ibarra, co-founded with Jay Mendoza. I was involved with the FOCUS youth branch which was called Bagong Bayan. We did work with PAWIS in 2002 with the airport screeners campaign. I learned a lot during that time being immersed in serving the Filipino community in San José. By that time, I got inspired to create something with my own peeps.

MAIZ became a youth cultural group. It launched in that momentum leading to May 1, 2006 by creating a youth contingent. We did some cultural work. We marched and held dialogues and cultural events. Then, we developed a youth space, and then a women space. We tried to organize teachers, too — people for education. The women space was called Cihuatl Tlatocan, which in Nahuatl means “gathering for women.” The youth space was called Youth Against Violence for Education, and it was inspired by unfortunately, seven killings in the Seven Trees neighborhood within seven months. I remember the number seven. We did flyering and everything. We had a partnership with Andrew Hill High School, and counselor, Joshua Green, gave us a space to do an after-school program with the youth there. We ended up creating a community dialogue around the violence and tying it with economic analysis. We had leaders come through — it was amazing magic. It was from 2006 to 2011.

In 2013, a lot of the women leaders of MAIZ all had babies in the same year. We all took a step back to be mommies and build community with our babies and our families. It’s been nice. We want to come back now because the babies are more independent, they’re four now. They’re definitely walking on their own, and talking on their own. We’re raising subversive children.

People have been approaching us saying, I want to be a part of MAIZ, but I’m trying to assess: how’s it going to look like? How are we going to do intersectional, multigenerational work in one space? When we had the women space, we were all in our early 30s and late 20s. It’s not the same anymore. We acknowledge that we’re moms now. How do we organize as moms? What are the possible campaigns?

People get attracted to MAIZ because of the cultural work. They love how we do our cultural work and how blended it into our organizing. I think a lot of people miss MAIZ but I need to figure out how to do a campaign.

We did an action in September of last year, 2017, due to the announcement around DACA being shut down. It was 108 degree weather and we had a rally of over 100 people, all organized in four days. That experience told me, “Alright, we got this.” How do you do that with over a hundred people in the most inconvenient weather? It gave me more confidence about who’s really on board.

There’s a spiritual aspect to your work that connects with your native roots. How do you make sure that your spirit is healthy doing this work? How do you meld your activism with spirituality?

That’s a whole another layer of identity building. When I was at San José High School as a junior in 1996, I joined a statewide leadership, weeklong camp called the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Conference. You learn about Chicano history, Latino history, and about policy, advocacy, community organizing, and culture. You stay in these dorms at CSU Sacramento. We got to visit key leaders at the Capitol and they brought out indigenous dancing as well. There, I met a lot of the organizers against Prop 187 in ’94, ’95. In essence, I got to meet a new generation of youth leaders.

By the time I got to San Jose State, one of the friends that I met there — he was a youth leader in San Diego mentored by Chicano activists. (There is some fierce organizing in San Diego considering they’re at the border — where more is there a clear contradiction of how America shows up against our people.) He ended up going to Berkeley while I was at State. We ended up meeting up and he said, I’m going to a sweat lodge in Watsonville by elders (an elder is someone over 52) who settled down in Watsonville and created an Aztec dance group, White Hawk. They had a Toquali or a Peyote ceremony. I got involved and it became like heaven, my refuge. That was in 2000 and I created relationships with people who took care of the medicine. They would have a sweat lodge every week, and every weekend I was there, unless there were some actions or I had family commitments.

I got introduced to Aztec dancing when I was in high school and I fell in love with it. I never got a chance to join it, but that’s my weakness — I love Aztec dancing! I love how it feels when the drum goes, and now as a mother, I get it. The drum beat is a reflection of the heart beat — it is the first song and the first means of communication that you send to your child in the womb. At the end of the day as humans, we get called by the drum.

In your span of movement building in San José, what have been some challenges and victories as a Chicanx organizer?

There’s very few of us that have stuck around — that are in it as a lifestyle, Chicanx wise, considering that we don’t have a bi-national liberation front per se. The only model is the Zapatistas (EZLN) and how they lead a people’s liberation struggle. In essence, that’s the contemporary school of thought of organizing. I’m still trying to figure out and maintain a base, an intergenerational base here that is aligned to what EZLN is doing because it’s doing beautiful work. They’re impacting the world by what they did — not to say that it had its struggles and its challenges, of course. A lot of it had to with sexism and patriarchy but the women are stepping up and you can tell by their recent first International Gathering of Politics, Arts, Sports, and Culture. I’ve noticed that, as a thirty something, I’m one of the few that pays attention to both the politics of México here and there’s not too many people committed to be organizers.

But [also,] I’m the older daughter. I have to be a caregiver for my parents. I’m not just there for me and my son, but I’m there for my parents as they’re getting older. That’s my personal struggle, which is not limited to what my peers are going through. Some of them had to be there for their parents before they became moms. We’re there for family a lot and we have our own personal struggles, traumas, and dramas that we got to attend to before we have to be there and serve some body else.

[At the same time,] there is beautiful San José history. Saul Verduzco, my friend and San José State classmate, helped create the first AB 540 student group in the nation, Students for a Higher Education (SAHE), and it gave inspiration for other campuses to organize their own AB 540 groups. Groups like SAHE inspired the folks that now run United We Dream. San José contributes hardcore to social change. We are catalysts here. The first walkouts were heré. My mentors in San José were mentoring the Los Angeles folks who did the walkouts in March 1968, and boom, it became a part of the media.

What words of wisdom do you have for young organizers?

Go to the elders. Reach out to them via social media and tap into them. Be fearless. Our indigenous medicine says you can dream a better world. All you have to do is implement it. You got quotes by Angela Davis and Che Guevarra. You got political quotes to sustain that. We are our ancestors’ dreams come true. I do see a lot of fearlessness particularly within undocumented communities and undocumented students.

The undocumented students became the new brown, Latinx movement. [They are] fearless because they are redefining what citizenship is, redefining what agency is, how to exist in this idea beyond nationality and redefining what home is. Some of the politics [they have] feel problematic in the sense that [they] want to claim the United States as our home. That’s super problematic but it’s making some gains nonetheless. Families do stay together especially families like mine. In my family of six, we have three citizens by birth, one citizen that went through a pathway to citizenship, and two green card holders. Easily under Trump, two people could be [deported] because of criminal acts. We’re lucky that nothing has happened but it could happen.

I would say to youth be fearless, we got you. My generation was able to do so much but your generation is probably going to do more because you have more capacity, more resources, and less fear filters. You have more models of inspiration whereas my generation had up until the 1990s worth of history of struggle. You have an extra fifteen years of beautiful work that has happened, and it has been around the undocumented student struggle.

Adriana Garcia: La Patriota of San José was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was it like to grow up as Vietnamese womxn in your hometowns, and how did your childhood informed your life journeys?

Giao Tran: I mostly grew up in Orange County, which has a huge Vietnamese population; I think there’s a lot of parallels with the Vietnamese community politics here in San José and in Orange County. There’s still differences, but the common threads are there. I grew up really involved during my high school years with groups that considered themselves anti-communist. I thought that this was the way to be involved in the community, because they called themselves Vietnamese, and they always proclaimed themselves as the ultimate embodiment of what a Vietnamese person is; that’s how I first got involved.

As I grew in my work, I started understanding myself more, and started to see a lot of contradictions. For instance, there’s an annual Têt Parade in the city of Westminister, which is in the hub of the Vietnamese community, and it was originally organized by the city, so anyone really could participate. Once the city lost funding for that parade [back in 2012 or 2013], it went into the hands of a private Vietnamese group. The group wouldn’t allow the LGBT contingent to be a part of the parade, calling that community all the horrible things you can imagine, like: “These people are sick, our children shouldn’t be around them. They’re not Vietnamese, they shouldn’t be with us.” That created a whole controversy, and I remember being there and feeling so conflicted. I think it was moments like that that really built me to come to the conclusion that we need more progressive activism in our community, and a progressive voice, with all its imperfections. Being involved in Vietnamese work has always been something that just came to me naturally. I’ve always really enjoyed it, as hard as it can be sometimes. For me being Vietnamese is synonymous with my queer and bi identity and my progressive values. I’m really proud of that because it was a long journey to get here.

Carolyn Le: I was never really involved in the community as an advocate or organizer until recently. I was born and raised in Eastside San José — never moved, same home, same neighborhood. In San José, there’s a very huge population of Vietnamese people. Growing up Vietnamese, I felt like I was just growing up. I saw so many Vietnamese people that I didn’t really feel like there was a different identity, but I did feel that there were rifts within our community. While there are a lot of Vietnamese people in San José, especially Eastside San José, I could tell that our identity or the way people kind of talked about their identity, was not very celebrated. We’ll get together and have food and barbecue, and go to Têt events, but outside of that, for people my age, at least when I was going into high school and junior high, there were those who did not want to speak Vietnamese, and those who did speak Vietnamese — it was like two different groups that wouldn’t associate with one another.

As an organizer now, I think a lot about my upbringing. Growing up I had a lot of strong women family members. My parents divorced when I was really young before I started school. I only had sisters and my mom, and I would go to my aunt’s for daycare, but what I felt looking back at that [time], I felt a lot of resentment. I felt incredibly suppressed by Vietnamese Confucian values. A lot of times, women are sometimes the perpetrators, and they uphold and maintain Confucian values, or patriarchal values. I was so constrained and repressed by the rules of femininity, and I harbor a lot of resentment over that. As an adult now, I feel like a lot of change needs to happen– no more excuses, this behavior of just upholding and maintaining patriarchy within the Vietnamese family, and Confucian values– it just has to change. There’s no more excuses for that anymore. Part of the reason why I’m an organizer is because I want to enact that type of change.

How did Việt Unity begin, and what trends have you seen in the San José Vietnamese community in moving towards more progressive values?

GT: Việt Unity in the South Bay began in late 2016. At that time, I and other folks were organizing in the Việt Unity East Bay chapter, and in that chapter we had been talking about possibly forming a Vietnamese for Black Lives group. [We were] feeling inspired by the movement for Black Lives, and to do that internal work on structural racism in our own community. We started having meetings in San José because we were taking turns of where we were having our meetings. I was coming from San José, and other folks were in Oakland, so we would switch on and off. We continued having meetings in San José, trying to bring other San José people together, because San José has such a huge Vietnamese community. While there’s still a Vietnamese community in San Francisco and Oakland, it’s not as big. [We wanted] work to be done here.

We had a series of discussions on what should we do, and eventually folks felt like, to address structural racism, we have to address all these other issues that are connected with it. It’s not just racism, it’s sexism, it’s patriarchy, it’s homophobia, it’s transphobia–it’s all these things. We felt that we wanted to create a Vietnamese group that has these progressive-Left values. At first we called ourselves the Vietnamese Justice Collective. Then, there were some folks who were from Việt Unity in the East Bay, and thought that having a chapter called Việt Unity in the South Bay would kind of streamline our organizational development. Since then, our work has really grown.

I do still think that the typical tendencies are there, but I think with our work, we’ve really started opening up the conversations and opening up space to address issues that I don’t think the Vietnamese community would have traditionally addressed, or be as vocal about such as the Vietnamese folks who have been detained and deported from the US. That hasn’t just started happening since Trump’s been in office, that’s been happening, even when Obama was in office, but it’s being escalated due to a lot of Vietnamese folks who have been formerly incarcerated. I think us being vocal about that has been making it easier for more groups to also be vocal about it. I do think that there is movement, but there’s always a lot of work to be done.

CL: I whole-heartedly agree with Giao — there’s more work to be done. I mentioned earlier that for me, trends in the Vietnamese community, at least here, definitely have lots of rifts, lots of divide. It’s definitely a narrative of “good” Vietnamese versus “bad” Vietnamese, “good” immigrants versus “bad” immigrants. Within those narratives, it’s the educated versus uneducated, like the business-owner versus the non-business-owner, and also rifts between generations — 1st generation, 1.5, 2nd, 3rd.

I got to be real, I feel like our community lacks a lot of empathy. It’s not that they don’t have empathy, but maybe that they just don’t want to feel like it’s a burden to kind of tap into your empathic self. It could be just because of Vietnamese people being in all these wars for so long back in Vietnam, where it’s just really hard to be vulnerable and emotional. I hate this cliché, but this whole idea of the survival of the fittest — I think that’s something that Vietnamese people definitely carried over from Vietnam. Something I do see with being a part of Việt Unity is that while there is a lot of work that needs to be done, it is being done, it’s being done today. A lot of organizers that aren’t Vietnamese will ask me, “How do we get Vietnamese people out?” [laughing] And I’m like, “We’re working on the same thing! You know, we don’t know; we’re just so divided at this point.” But the more work we do as organizers, the more our work becomes visible, and I think it just wakes people up, it kind of enacts them.

Việt Unity has been initiating accompaniment work around deportations and detentions lately — how did this work come about and how do you see it growing in the future?

GT: We had formed about a year or so before we had someone contact us about a Vietnamese woman who was in detention, and her family member had reached out to us. I think so much about this work has to do with where people are at, mentally and also identifying the source of where our suffering is. Our group felt that we had to do something about this. That’s when we really came together and we were trying to make contact with the family.

People Acting in Community Together (PACT) was really supporting us with doing the accompaniment because they’ve had experience with that before. They connected us with resources with the larger immigration fight, helping us learn more about the legal system and how other people and families had been accompanied. It’s been a partnership between us and PACT to do that work, and it’s just been growing since then. There were a series of press release statements that were made public by different groups, one of them by Việt Lead in Philadelphia, that denounced the deportations and put a contact number — that was one of the first ways Vietnamese people had a number that they could call. It was one or two press releases after that, one of which Việt Unity signed onto, where we put a local number that people in the South Bay can call if they are at risk of being deported or about to go into a check-in with ICE. It’s really growing — we’ve accompanied and made contact with about 30 families so far, and everyone we accompany is different. Right now we have families who are really enthusiastic and such a light in the dark because they share so much hope. By sharing their stories they can help other people feel like they’re not alone. I feel like our work is at a really great place right now.

I hear it sometimes with the people who I accompany, who’ll say, “Why do you advocate for me? I’ve done so many bad things in my past.” And I tell them, “I don’t advocate for who you were. I advocate for who you could be and you could be so many things. You have so much potential.” That’s why I think it’s so important to do deportation resistance work, so that [people] aren’t defined by their past mistakes.

CL: I also wanted to mention about how we, Việt Unity, became involved in deportation resistance work. It was one of the first times that all these Vietnamese organizations from all over the country met in Washington, D.C. — it was just so powerful and timely. It was a Southeast Asian conference, and there were Vietnamese organizers and organizations there. We all came together and talked about [the fact that] there’s a huge elephant in our community that everyone’s ignoring and we need to talk about it. Viêt Lead had been leading the way, and I think this was the moment Việt Unity joined into it. It was the first national coalition of Vietnamese organizers, and I felt that it was so powerful just to see so many progressive Vietnamese people all over the country. It just felt really nice, and it fuels me. I also think about why our work in deportation resistance is so important for our community. It’s because we have this idea of the “bad” Vietnamese– these narratives get swept underneath the rug so often, but telling these narratives is just a way of showing these human stories and the realities of being human that there’s no such thing as a “bad” or a “good” Vietnamese or those types of binaries.

Sometimes there are people within our community who will say, “Why do you advocate for criminals?” I hear it sometimes with the people who I accompany, who’ll say, “Why do you advocate for me? I’ve done so many bad things in my past.” And I tell them, “I don’t advocate for who you were. I advocate for who you could be and you could be so many things. You have so much potential.” That’s why I think it’s so important to do deportation resistance work, so that [people] aren’t defined by their past mistakes.

What dreams do you have for your people in San José and globally?

CL: I think unity, Việt Unity [laughs], solidarity, and empathy. I feel like if we can get that down, we can do so much more work.

GT: It’s a hard question. I think what I dream for the Vietnamese community is what I dream for everyone, that hopefully, one day, we can have a more just society, that we don’t sweep people to the margins, that we stand up for what’s right, that we don’t police people based on these lines that we draw, that we don’t separate families, that we welcome everyone, no matter how they identify and who they love.

I would like other people like me to know that they’re powerful in who they are, and they don’t need to be this embodiment, this idea of strength, in a tough, patriarchal way. They can be strong in their vulnerability; whoever takes advantage of that, that’s not on you, that’s on them.

How do you want to grow as organizers in this movement?

CL: I believe that when you advocate, you have to advocate with an intersectional lens. When you advocate for some type of cause, you have to think about how race, class, economic standing, language, education, gender– how it all fits in– because if you don’t think of it intersectionally, you may reproduce the same type of harm that you’re trying to dismantle. You may be oppressing other people. Advocating with an intersectional lens is like advocating with a feminist lens; so your advocacy should be feminist. One example that doesn’t really pertain to Việt Unity work is a lot of people are advocating for a complete ban on plastic straws. I know San Francisco is implementing that, and IKEA is phasing out plastic straws. To advocate with an intersectional feminist lens is to think about, well, if we get rid of all these plastic straws, which is going to be great for the world, what about people who really need plastic straws in order to take up liquid? For people with disabilities, there might be people who can not hold a cup, and even when they hold it, they spill it. These plastic straws need to be bendy, so if you advocate on a ban on plastic straws, you have to think about the disabled community and how it’s going to affect them. We can’t just say, “Hey, city government, ban plastic straws!” and then, with the disabled community, “You guys, figure it out.” If you’re gonna advocate something, you gotta think about everything.

GT: I think one way I’m growing right now as an organizer, just as a person is — being a relatively young woman, who also happens to be queer and is Asian, I’m always kind of putting myself on guard to be ready to stand up for myself. I’m always coming up with a front like, “What are you gonna do about this? Are you gonna try to take us down?” I’ve been slowly trying to learn that I can still be powerful while being more gentle with myself, and not needing to approach things, in a way that’s confrontational with anybody and everybody, but more so about finding a balance between that. I think it’s possible, and I’m trying to figure out what that balance is for myself. I would like other people like me to know that they’re powerful in who they are, and they don’t need to be this embodiment, this idea of strength, in a tough, patriarchal way. They can be strong in their vulnerability; whoever takes advantage of that, that’s not on you, that’s on them. So I’m trying to learn that more.

What words of wisdom do you have for other Vietnamese womxn and queer organizers?

CL: Hold onto your rage, it is a very nice driving force. [laughs] And also, advocate with a feminist lens.

GT: I would say, don’t be afraid to ask. Never be afraid to ask. Surround yourself with like-minded people who support you and nurture you. Always remember that you’re a dope badass, and nobody can tell you otherwise.

Giao Tran and Carolyn Le: Holding On To The Rage was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How would you describe yourself?

My name is Liz González, and I probably would never describe myself as an activist. I’m from San José, first generation, my parents are both from México, and I grew up in East San José. I’m super proud of that. I’m just a regular person who wants a better world.

How did you get involved with journalism and writing?

It was not until I met the people — and I didn’t even meet them actually — not until I got connected with folks that would become De-Bug because I don’t think I would have ever considered myself becoming a writer. I wanted to be a psychologist, don’t we all wanna fix each other? But, I worked a summer job at a high tech assembly plant on 10th street here in San José because my brother was a supervisor for that company. He got me that summer job while I was at Evergreen [Community College.]

That job wasn’t difficult, but it was so boring and very demanding. I ended up living at that job that summer and noticed who was working there. It was a lot of older women, a lot of immigrants. A lot of women would tell me, “Liz, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school? Go to school!” They would try night school, but when you work from 6 AM to 6 PM, there’s no way you’re gonna finish night school because they had tried and they had all dropped out.

I wouldn’t send it over, I would try to figure what the heck was wrong with that modem myself. That is where we got the name for De-Bug, because other folks on the assembly line would recognize what de-bug means– it’s the team that figures out and exposes the problem and fixes it.

It was a place [where] we weren’t encouraged to talk. If we were talking, the supervisors would come around and — I do remember it as a joke but you don’t joke like that — they would say, “Shut up or I’ll send you back to Mexico. Do you wanna go back to the Philippines?” These were ladies that could’ve been their grandmas. As a 19 year old kid, I was just like, “Shit, how can you talk like that to someone who could be your grandma?”

So, it was right at the end of that job, somebody that I knew through Californians For Justice asked if I wanted to write about what it was like to work on an assembly line because folks in San Francisco were asking for stories. I was like, “Oh hell yea!” I never used my brain in that job, I’ll write about it. I remember I used to write sad poetry when the line was slow. But I would get excited when our product — the modem — didn’t work because then you would send it over to the debug team who was supposed to figure it out. But I wouldn’t send it over. I would try to figure what the heck was wrong with that modem myself. That was where we got the name for De-Bug, because other folks on the assembly line would recognize what debug means– it’s the team that figures out and exposes the problem and fixes it.

An 'Unauthorized Diary' of Silicon Valley, From Its Underside | KQED News

How did you end up meeting with the people who would begin De-Bug?

So, it was through that connection, through Californians for Justice. One of the organizers at that time named Kathy Ryan – an amazing person – and Raj. Raj and her had met. I ended up typing my story and I left it in my mailbox, and somebody magically came to pick it up from my mailbox — very strange. It was Raj. I didn’t meet him until much later. I was going to meet the group of folks who had written about– we didn’t all work at the same company– we were all gonna meet up. I had only talked to Raj on the phone, so I walked into this Vietnamese cafe on 1st street, looking for a Black guy–‘cause Raj sounds like a Black guy on the phone! I didn’t find him, and then I figured out it was Raj.

Because we were from San José, we didn’t just want to write for a youth paper in San Francisco, we wanted something for San José.

So we wrote for a youth paper called Youth Outlook in San Francisco — that’s where those first stories got published. They were all folks who were 19, or in their 20s.

How did you stick with De-Bug? Was it a conscious decision?

Oh man, no. De-Bug was never supposed to be anybody’s job. We didn’t have a name for a long time, and we kept writing, maybe it was like a handful of folks, maybe six people I would say, who started. We kept writing for the San Francisco paper. Sometimes we would go up there to Pacific News Service. It was kind of a blessing to be connected to Pacific News Service because it was run by some real eclectic folks, and they really believed in youth – like anybody–-and that everybody has the ability to tell their story and their voice matters, and how do you introduce those voices to other folks and to policy makers, and really respecting the voice. So, we got to be a part of their editorial meetings where there would be really recognized writers, and homeless youth, and people who had no business being in editorial meetings. But we were all equals, and all our ideas were valuable. So, being exposed to that really lays the foundation for how we operate as De-Bug.

If I see people who are doing what they truly love, folks who have come through here and maybe not have come through here either, if folks are doing what they truly love, then that is a success to me, and to us.

Because we were from San José, we didn’t just want to write for a youth paper in San Francisco, we wanted something for San José. Some folks were still working at companies, and we wanted something for the workers–‘cause that job was really isolating, even though you’re there for more than 12 hours a day. I don’t know if it was conscious at that time, but like, when folks read those stories, they saw themselves for the first time, reflected in a printed story. People were so proud to have their name in a by-line, once we got our own magazine (it was really tiny).

At that time, it really was focused on the temporary worker and all the contradictions that we still have in Silicon Valley, of these folks making enormous wealth, folks who make the wealth of the region but don’t have any of it, and are suffering in toxic jobs, risking their lives, and are not even aware that their job is toxic. So, there was a majority focus on workers — getting folks to know their rights, because unfortunately as contract workers you didn’t really have a lot of rights. You didn’t have benefits, and you can be let go at any time. Our first tagline used to be “The voice of the young and temporary.”

Do you feel like the organization and your writing, and your work in general, has helped change San José when you first started?

You know I was thinking about this one, how has it changed, and because of how we developed and grew together in De-Bug, if I see people who are doing what they truly love, folks who have come through here and maybe not come through here either, if folks are doing what they truly love, then that is a success to me, and to us. Because it doesn’t have to be necessarily some kind of activism. There are folks who wanted to do art, or who wanted to cook, and they’re cooking in the kitchen now, or own their own business. The fact that they’re doing that, that’s what I count.

What is an accomplishment that you’re most proud of?

I don’t know! I can’t believe that we’re still around – 18 years later, and that we’re still attempting to operate much like in those first days ’cause we were never a typical organization in any sense. So to stay to those values — for the outside world it won’t make a lot of sense — but this place and the folks here, it’s really centered around relationships with each other. Because then no matter what the problem is or the issue–that’s why we don’t make sense, like how can you do this, and how can you do that? We started with this radio and tv and art and people used to think we were a tagging crew or whatever, and rappers, and activists, and very traditional activists too, and intergenerational — how do those folks come together under one roof? They usually don’t, but because we weren’t like, “Oh, you must be an activist, and you must want to go to protests, if you wanna be in this group…” It’s always been around, “Well, what is it that you’re interested in? What do you want to do? How do we grow together? How do we build together?” With the idea that, together we’re always stronger, you know? And recognizing that if you’re doing well, your success is our success. Things like that, that would count as a victory.

You can’t be angry forever. What kind of life are you gonna lead and what’s gonna sustain you? The energy of anger is not gonna sustain you and not gonna create the world that you wanna see. I’m glad to see the changes that have happened, and that we’re not ignoring the individual, because really, I do believe that it’s up to each individual to be at peace, and then we’ll see a peaceful world.

Can I ask why you don’t like calling yourself an activist?

I mean, it also has to do a lot with the early De-Bug days, I was already connected with some other groups–and maybe I should just get over this word meaning, right, but for the United States, an activist to me equates sometimes as a weekend warrior person, or somebody who just does a hobby, and maybe just for a little while. Because most of the time, folks that are most impacted by any issue don’t get to fight to improve it, or have the choice of, “Oh, right now, I don’t have to focus on that.” You have to do it all the time. So, in the global scale, in the United States, for me at least, it has a negative connotation, like eventually you’ll stop being an activist, and you’ll go lead your good life, but the conditions will still exist. I know it’s just a label, but then you’re not allowed to be your whole self — you’re a spiritual, emotional person — and sometimes in activism those things aren’t together. Now, more, you see it, but 18 years ago, it wasn’t like that. Nobody wants to be a fuckin’ martyr. There’s some aspects of the connotations that come up with activism that I don’t like, and I don’t want [that] for my life, and not my family — they don’t know what the hell an activist or an organizer is, so if they can’t grasp it, it’s not a real thing.

What are some challenges and some victories you’ve seen in creating change in San José?

I think the challenging part is when you’re in it this many years deep, and you realize, like damn, it’s like the same stuff that we’re fighting. A few years ago, or maybe it was just last year, when Anthony Nunez was shot by police on July 4th, there was some students from Eastside Union High School district that did a walkout because they wanted to protest police brutality. I was so excited by them — I couldn’t believe that they existed and that they were organizing. And I went to their walkout and marching through downtown, we were saying the same chants that I was saying at their age, and police were still killing folks that look like us. So those kind of moments when you’re like, “Oh my god, what do we do different? And how?”

When I first came into De-Bug, I knew I was a very angry person. I was pissed at everything. In these efforts, I would say, right, it’s a good place to start, because it [the anger]’s motivating you to do something, but you can’t be angry forever. What kind of life are you gonna lead and what’s gonna sustain you? The energy of anger is not gonna sustain you and not gonna create the world that you wanna see. I’m glad to see the changes that have happened, and that we’re not ignoring the individual, because really, I do believe that it’s up to each individual to be at peace, and then we’ll see a peaceful world. We’re never gonna get there if we don’t, or if we don’t have enough of us, in that state. The bigger world is just a reflection of what’s going on inside every single one of us–but we don’t know that, or we aren’t told that.

People need to break open their hearts because it is all temporary. Folks can be proud of their life if you’ve really helped make it better even for one person. If you have helped make the world a better place for one person, then you’ve lived a good life.

How do you find peace?

Well, I’m still developing my ideal spiritual practice, but I also do energy healing and guided meditation so those type of things help me. At one point, I did not believe in a God. How can this fucked up world have a god, right? But now, that brings me a lot of peace, to know that this is not just complete chaos, you know? Some of those things come from being a part of De-Bug, and understanding that we each ultimately can direct our own destiny, and really believing that and going for it. ’Cause most of us are too fuckin’ scared to do something that seems crazy. It’s the only way to live your life, otherwise you’re living somebody else’s life.

Do you consider yourself a healer?

Yes but we ALL are. That’s the thing, you know — we just operate under this Western idea that we must go to somebody else to fix you instead of knowing that there’s nobody else that can tell you besides yourself, when you really investigate yourself, or when you learn who you are — you’re always gonna know the answer, you always know the answer. We’re just never looking there; we want somebody else to fix it, somebody else to help us.

What do you think are some points of healing for the Silicon Valley?

My biggest thing, actually, that goes into the healing thing, is we really do need to operate from the heart. Here, you can clearly see that folks are not operating from the heart at all because they don’t care about other people. That’s the model of Silicon Valley: “too bad for you– we did it.” Not everybody’s gonna be on top all the time, you know, and then what? People need to break open their hearts because it is all temporary. Folks can be proud of their life if you’ve really helped make it better even for one person. If you have helped make the world a better place for one person, then you’ve lived a good life.

How do you think being a woman has impacted your healing and your own work?

That’s why we’re even more wounded; not to be like, “Oh, I’m more wounded,” but to be born a woman in this time, even though we have this illusion of being free here in the United States of America, all the psychological warfare of not being a white person in the United States, you have to work through so much mud that shouldn’t be there in the first place, but it’s a real weight for us to be able to say “No” to all these things, and figure out how not to fall into those things again and again and again. Those messages that say, “It’s a rebellious/revolutionary act to love yourself”– I really do believe that.

We all have a gift, that’s the thing that is needed of you right now. Everything else supposedly comes after that.

Say for instance, for me, I didn’t feel beautiful or recognize myself as beautiful until I went to spend some extended time in a country where people looked like me. The story there is that I met a white person who is from here too, and those folks down there used to say, “Oh, she’s so pretty, look at her skin” and that was the only reason they would call her pretty, because of her skin color. But for me, being in a place where everyone was brown — even though they didn’t really look like me, it was Guatemala — I felt, “Oh, maybe I’m beautiful too.” So, we have to wade through much more, but then you’re also aware of what other people maybe are dealing with, maybe you have some more consideration, some more empathy.

How do people recognize that it’s not a competition, when that’s all we’re taught to think–that we’re in competition with everyone else for everything? So, consciously I will choose spaces that have women and women’s groups, and my vision includes to have a real women’s center in San José, run and led by women of color — to really do whatever we want in San José.

What advice would you give to future healers and womxn doing your type of work?

My truest wisdom is let joy lead you. It might not look like activism, but whatever it is that makes you happy and you get excited about bringing to the world — what’s your gift? We all have a gift, that’s the thing that is needed of you right now. Everything else supposedly comes after that.

What gives you hope?

Oh, still the youth! It’s so hard — I imagine everybody being sad at the generations after them like, damn, you guys got it so fucked up, it’s so terrible, cause that’s what I think, hearing from youth today and because of social media, how hard it must be, but then they do shit like walk out all across the country– so that gives me hope, that some people are thinking about other things, and that it’s not always gonna be this way.

Liz González: Opening Hearts while Writing Out the Wrongs was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Describe your first exposure to activism.

I got involved during my student years when I was studying at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. Prior to that, my mother was a political prisoner. I was exposed to community organizing as young as maybe ten. We would go to mobilizations, and we would go to some workers’ meetings because my mom used to be a workers rights’ organizer. That’s when I got exposed but I didn’t get to really be involved until I went to college. It was fun. It was exciting. The organizing was really alive. I worked with my classmates, the student council, and other student groups on campus.

Were your other family members involved with community organizing?

They were a part of other student organizations, but it was a different part of my life where my mom was organizing and my siblings were involved. However, they can’t get involved [now] because they have families now so it’s different when you’re young and you’re a student.

How would you compare activism in the United States with organizing in the Philippines?

In the Philippines, [Filipinos] are directly affected. I’m not saying we’re not directly affected here but it’s so intense or worse [back in the Philippines.] Over here, it’s a little bit challenging because they [Filipinos] left the Philippines because they want a better life. They’re very focused on fulfilling the American Dream. That’s one of the challenges of organizing here.

What was one of the first campaigns you led in the US?

At the time, it was the Justice for Airport Screeners campaign. I came in 2002 and 9/11 happened a year before. The intensification of the War on Terror was present at the time. When they [the US] passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, they required airport screeners to become US citizens because they basically scapegoated immigrants for the bombing of the twin towers. Because of that, they saw that most of the airport screeners in the airport, especially international airports, were immigrants.

I did not know about the law and what the organizing looked like here. When I had the opportunity to talk to the workers who are going to be impacted by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, I immediately got involved because I knew that was something that I could do. I could not just educate the workers about their rights but also help them build an organization that could protect them.

The workers had to go through an elimination process. It was basically an examination test to [see] if you can do your job as an airport screener but the examination that they took really had nothing to do with the job. It’s about English proficiency. Even the test was conducted on a computer base. You go into a room and you put headphones on and you use a computer to answer the test for a short period of time. Imagine that was the time that computers were just starting to be more high tech and even then, it was just a floppy disk. They [the workers] didn’t really have experience using computers for the test so a majority of them failed. The test was really designed to get rid of the workers. So, we [NAFCON] were trying to fight for them to be retained. That was our campaign.

We were doing a lot of computer trainings because you were told you needed a computer. We were helping a lot of them to become US citizens. We even negotiated with the US Congress to expedite the process of them becoming US Citizens but one challenge that most of them faced was their family petitions because they didn’t want to become US citizens. It was faster to petition your families for permanent residency [without US citizenship.]

In the span of 3 months, the workers were laid off without notice and without getting their last pay checks. We filed some labor violations because of that. There was also a transition from the old airport screeners to the new airport screeners. The new airport screeners needed to be federal employees. The airports said they could not tell the workers when that [transition] would happen because of security breaches, but it was very painful to see people going to work and then told that they don’t have a job anymore. A lot of them had multiple family members working at the airport. This was also the time when the employers increased their pay but they didn’t know why they got an increase. They later on found that they federalized job and then, increased the pay. But they were never told. So they bought houses, they bought cars. After that, everyone was laid off. They sold their houses. They sold their cars because of that so the impact of this disruption to their families was very hard.

After that, we were not able to win our campaign by keeping them at their jobs so we helped them find [new] jobs. That’s when the caregiving industry started. I think the industry started as a result of the prices of housing at the time. Most of the houses were converted to care homes so a lot of airport screeners got trained to become caregivers. But I would say ten, at least, were able to get their jobs [back] but these were people with military backgrounds and [those] born and raised here. We also tried to file a lawsuit for racial discrimination and age discrimination but the government still said no and said it was about security. It was about terrorism. It was about the War on Terror so there wasn’t too much that we could do.

Instead, we were able to help form an organization. Some of the workers became members or officers of the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants. They got jobs in the airport but with different positions, and they learned from the Justice for Airport Screeners campaign. They didn’t have a union [back then] and they didn’t have the power of negotiation so they got involved with [forming] a union. That was an accomplishment. We were training them to become organizers, how to facilitate meetings, how to do lobbying work, how to do advocacy work. So it basically paid off. Most of them became leaders of the union and up until to now, we still have a union at the airport.

For me, for someone that just arrived in the US, I didn’t really speak that much English. It was a very good learning experience for me to really fully grasp and understand what we mean by imperialism because when you’re in the Philippines, you study it in college and how it impacts the Philippines. Over here, this is what it looks like.

What is it like to be a migrant mother organizing these movements?

At that time, there were other organizers [in San Jose] that were able to help us set up a non-profit. It was called Filipino Community Support, or FOCUS. That was an opportunity for me as a migrant organizer, as a migrant woman and a mom, to be a mom and at the same time, organize. If I was working at a different job, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. My kids were so young back then. They were only one year old and six years old and so it was good that my partner back then was an organizer in the nonprofit that we set up. We were able to support each other in becoming parents but also how to organize at the same time. For me, it was a very fulfilling experience.

Of course, things have changed. We didn’t have funding any more but we continued to organize the workers with my volunteer time because at the time I was working at a union. While organizing at the union, I was working with Filipino workers. One important factor was that I was able to do it with the family support. My in-laws were able to help with childcare and studying.

You’ve been in San Jose for a very long time. How have you seen the city change since 2002 especially through working with the Filipino community?

Well, definitely there’s a lot. The airport screeners we worked with, some of them have moved out of state because they can’t afford to live here any more. There are so many developments in the city and the cost of living just becomes so high and there’s nothing to give back to the community. That’s one big change.

There’s a lot of care homes now, but I think even the price around healthcare is a problem [along with] social benefits and social services. When we had the non-profit, health was one of the things we were talking about. There are not a lot of Filipino nonprofits [providing] services for the Filipino community [even when] the Filipino community is the 3rd or 4th largest Asian community in the County. That’s [also because] of the history of our people, or Filipino groups who have stolen funds. We used to have a Filipino Community Center where we could get services but [these groups] misused the funds. That became a label to the Filipino community.

How do you feel like you’ve changed since your arrival to the US?

For me, it’s the wealth of experience that I gained from talking to the workers. I was always sad because I didn’t have a family over here. I always wanted to go home but through the organizing and meeting the workers, they became my family. That made me stronger. That made me deepen my commitment to organize. I know that it’s not going to change over night. There’s always going to be issues that come up but we need to be organized.

What advice would you give to Filipinx organizers in San Jose?

Integration with the people and community is key. If you want to know their issues, it’s important to deeply get to know them. Spending time with them and really teaching and training them how to be not just leaders, not just organizers, but showing them that their problems are not separate to just them. It’s a problem that all of us have to change.

And patience! Patience is always going to be hard because when you organize, you’ll be meeting different people. When you meet with different people, it provides a reflection of what kind of person you would want to be. It’s patience but it’s also passion. It’s also the kind of lifestyle you want to have. Because at the end of the day, it’s your choice if you want to build a movement that will change something for everyone or you could just live your life like you used to.

How would you like to continue to grow?

For me, it’s about how can I continue to share my experience. How I can help not just in San Jose or the Bay Area but in different states? My dream is to go back to the Philippines but I need to prepare myself, because when I go back it’s a different story, it’s a different crisis.

Mara Ibarra: Leading the Migrant Movement as a Migrant Mother was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pinay: “Pinay” is a Tagalog word for a woman of Filipino descent.

How did you first get involved with Filipinx activism and mental health work?

I first got into mental health as a result of [my own] family experiences. I felt very isolated. A lot of things were happening to me, and I liked to read about why these things happened so I got into psychology and sociology. It wasn’t really until I went to UC Davis that I discovered that there’s a whole cultural aspect that influences my mental health. I discovered that Western therapy practices don’t always apply to immigrant experiences of intergenerational conflict and trauma.

I learned a lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise known. I started incorporating those ideas into my mental health studies. And now here I am! I’m with Filipino youth!

I went to Mission College, and I had always been organizing. I was the president of the Honor Society, always inviting others to do work with me but I never got to explore how my roots impacted my struggles. Then I got to UC Davis. I moved there a week before everyone else started coming in. So, I’m in this really boring farm town and I have nothing to do. I had no money and I was living in North Davis. I took a walk to campus, it was a 2–3 mile walk, it was 103 degrees, and I saw this building with a bridge–the Golden Gate bridge and the Filipino sun on it. It was the logo for Bridge: Filipino Outreach and Retention. I was like, “Oh look! There’s the Filipino sun. They’re probably from the Bay. I’m from the Bay!” I was homesick and so I kept that in my head. That building was closed so I kept walking.

A few days before school started, I went to this Asian American Fall Welcome with all seven of the Filipino-American organizations trying to recruit people. I met these twins, Valerie and Melissa Poquiz, from BRIDGE — that sign I saw on the building earlier that week. They reached out to me and we vibed right away because I could tell they were from the Bay. (I was right, they were from Hercules.) They kind of had attitude; they were different. So, they recruited me to Bridge, and then there was Kappa Psi Epsilon, the Filipina Sorority. This was my first time living away from home, and I’ve always wanted to join a sorority. They were also trying to recruit me.

The other thing was Sacramento has really whack music, so I had been listening to the radio that whole week and I emailed the radio station and I said, “Dude, your music sucks!” [laughs] “You guys need new music! You’ve been playing the same music over and over and over for 60 hours”– and they offered me an internship to become a DJ! So I had those three choices: Bridge, which was all about social justice; Kappa Psi Epsilon, which I would have loved to join because it’s such an empowering sisterhood; and then I had the option to become a DJ. I ended up choosing Bridge, and that’s just shaped my career ever since.

What experiences motivated you to stay working within the Filipino community?

I really liked what I was doing with Bridge at UC Davis. Then, I came home, and I was working at the mall. I couldn’t get any jobs at non-profits because I didn’t have a Masters. I was kinda void of Filipino-American anything when I first came home from college. So I joined a few other organizations, and then I met Angelica Cortez, the founder of LEAD Filipino, from another organization we were a part of. She was like, “Hey, I’m starting up this new Fil-Am org in San José, are you interested in joining it?” and I was like “Sure, I don’t know what I’m gonna do but okay.” [laughs]

I kind of liked the vibe with LEAD because Angelica let me do whatever the hell I wanted to do. Like 3 in the morning, I would text her and be like, “Hey Gels, I’m gonna start this program.” She’d be like, “Oh hell yeah!” That’s just how it’s been. Also, I’d call myself a disorganized organizer. I hate emails, meetings, spreadsheets and conference calls, so I do anything I can to avoid any of that. I don’t even own a laptop — PowerPoints for both my cohorts have been written out of my iPhone and my paper notebooks. But if you ask me to do a real quick history lesson, I love to use my voice, the angry spirit I carry during protests and government meetings, and my mean ass eyebrows to move people. I’m super old school and Gels let me be me while creating all these programs.

How would you describe LEAD Filipino and what are some projects you’ve led within the organization?

LEAD Filipino is a San Jose based organization that started with Angelica Cortez. For the first few years, she had just been sitting and observing the state of California and its lack of representation of Filipino Americans. Not just in government, but also in media and entertainment. Her push was to encourage Filipino Americans to take up those spaces because we’re one of the least represented. She wanted to change that.

With LEAD Filipino, there are a lot of different components. There’s a Fly Pinay program for empowering Filipinas. We connect entry-level Pinays with mentors who have at least 5 years of experience in their desired careers. We have an annual Fly Pinays Conference where the mentors and mentees spend the day in development and empowerment workshops. Throughout the rest of the year, we hold events for the pairs to attend together, but a lot of them go out and have career development conversations on their own. There are civic engagement programs where we work with the Asian Law Alliance to register Filipino American voters in Santa Clara County, and there’s the program that I oversee, the Education Program.

I create Filipino American Studies for schools and community programs in the South Bay. I do this because I remember being in high school and not wanting to be in class, ever. A large part of it was what was going on at home. The only time I was ever interested in school was when our classes had something to do with ethnic studies or introspection — but even that was very rare. I had the privilege of taking Asian American studies classes in college, and I do have to emphasize the word “privilege.” Not everyone is able to go to college, and these courses are rarely offered in any school. I wanted to offer an opportunity for folks to explore their culture and history and examine whether these have an impact on their struggles and successes, even if they don’t have the privilege of going to college.

We’re getting ready to teach another Awareness in Action Program in eastside San Jose this summer, and some of the classes are going to be facilitated by our Spring Training Program participants. It’s a free 8-week course and we’ll be focusing on Fil-Am Mental Health, kultura, and Filipino American history in the Bay Area. We also have our two Fil-Am History tours lined up to supplement the classes. I encourage anyone to join!

What has been your process in creating training programs and your own Filipino American Studies programs in an area where there are no Filipino American Studies at all?

Right now, we have three educational programs; one of them is the Awareness in Action program. It’s a summer program for college-level community members and every week, we teach a different aspect of Fil-Am culture, history, and movements. We talk about mental health, we talk about Fil-Ams in government, we talk about knowing your rights, and we talk about the 500 year history of Filipino Americans — one of our foundations of the class.

Our other program is our high school program, which is a year-round program of Filipino American Studies. Then, our spring training program is brand new. It’s in our first year, and we’re training people to teach the summer program. This program in particular came about because after having the summer program for two years, we’ve been approached by a lot of different programs and schools saying, “Hey, can we bring your curriculum to our school?” I was like, “Dude, this is great!” But there’s only one of me. So, I wanted to be able to train people to do what I do, so that the supply matches the demand. There’s a lot of passionate people out there; they just need an avenue to be trained and get the experience, and that’s the reason why I created this [program].

There is a 500-year history of colonialism that’s pretty much erased from Filipinos’ memories. Spain and the US may no longer claim the Philippines as a colony (neocolonialism will be a whole ‘nother conversation), but the trauma dating all the way back to the first interactions with Spaniards STILL lingers in our DNA, our thought processes, and our economic well-being, even after we’ve crossed the Pacific and created our lives out here. (If anyone would like to know what I’m talking about, come see me in my summer program.) My curriculum opens the doors for students to understand their interactions with their families and society with a cultural lens. And sometimes it’s painful. The later part of the program sticks to Angelica’s original vision — Awareness in Action. After participants explore their own history, how do they combine this new awareness with their talents to empower themselves and others?

I think the most rewarding part of creating the curriculum is building relationships. I often have guest speakers who are better versed in their subjects than I am, so I prefer to have them speak on what they’ve lived than to lecture about what I’ve read. I meet folks in the community just by walking up to them and introducing myself, and asking if they’d be down to share their stories with my students. I’m super lucky because everyone I’ve run into is down for the people.

I try to make my curriculum as interactive as possible. In this year’s summer program, the facilitators will be incorporating theatre skills we picked up from Bindlestiff Studio to introduce the class.

My process and goals have changed significantly since I picked up the Awareness in Action Program last summer. At first, I just wanted to teach Filipino Studies and maybe inspire folks to learn about their culture. Now, I work to give people foundations to create or improve their own programs.

What are the challenges and joys of being a Filipina educator, and a Filipina in general, here in the South Bay?

Being a Pinay, you’re not only this professional and you’re not just an educator. I think it comes with the culture, to be so caring about other people, that you end up nurturing everyone in a community. As fulfilling as that is, sometimes there’s no time for you. There’s time for everybody else but you.

What do you think are the best aspects of being a Pinay?

I take a lot of pride in the fact that Pinays can fucking do it all. We can be the leaders in our communities, and we can nurture our families. It’s a stereotype, and it’s also, at the same time, the strength that we have. It’s natural.

How do you see LEAD Filipino and your community growing in the future?

I see us having our own physical space. I see us being able to provide another space for people to say, “This is where the Filipinos organize.” We could be that. I [also] think we can create a lot more educational programs. I think we can be that space for empowerment for other Filipinos. I have to add that the Filipino community in San Jose owes a lot to the Mexican Heritage Plaza, North Side Community Center, and the Filipino Youth Coalition. A lot of South Bay Filipino organizers were schooled inside these facilities, and I will always have respect for the ones who built resources where nothing previously existed. I would like to expand these resources.

How does being a Pinay impact how you educate others, and how you lead your activism?

I think it definitely shows in the way I really, really care about other people, beyond just teaching them content. People reach out to you, and they know that you are able to take care of them not just as a student but as family. They’re able to trust that at the end of the day, I can still be there for them for moral support.

What words of wisdom do you have for future Pinays who are interested in doing this type of work?

Words of wisdom…I hope you wake up everyday and know that you are that bitch! That chick!

In community grassroots organizing, you’re making a lot of money moves but without the money. A lot of these big moves, they come out of the love I have in my heart for my people. But being a grassroots group also means a lot of times we’re coming out of pocket. That’s the struggle right [there], to just survive. My driving force with community organizing is [that] I wanna see people in my community thrive. I’m doing this so people have a resource.

Another thing that people don’t know is how much you struggle internally on a daily basis. I guess one thing I would tell people who are organizing is check up on each other all the time; even if it looks like “Oh yeah, I’m doing good.” Sometimes it’s the people who appear to be the fiercest or the strongest, they also need to check in. Just remember that.

Do you have other last words of wisdom you’d like to share?

I’d still like to become a DJ! [laughs] [But,] I would never be where I am today without folks opening doors for me: my advisers at Mission College — Rosalyn Chan, Carolyn Kuri, Aaron Malchow, Liz Pelayo, and Coach Corey Cafferata. A lot of what I know now in Fil Am organizing, I learned from Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, Kuya Dale Maglalang, Dr. Richard Kim, Kuya Kirby Araullo. And I can’t forget my closest homegirls and organizing partners Angelica Cortez and Jaki Joanino. And lastly my family who influence everything and listen to me when I cry.

Jay Page: A Fly Pinay for Community Based Education was originally published in Valley of Heart's Resistance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.