So here I am in Minneapolis. A Tejana from the southside of San Antonio, Tejas. Why do I mention the region of the city in which I was born? Because of the cultural and class significance this has always held for Chicanas/os who were born in a traditionally socioeconomically depressed region of the city. I and my immediate family had no problem living on this side of town as it was where our gente was from. Real gente...the type that went to the Mission pulga off Morrison Rd. every Sunday (but Wednesdays were even better for the deals) and who went to Chucho boys for produce. Others, like my aunts moved to the northside first chance they got because that meant something. Meant they were "moving up" to the northside (ala the Jeffersons) where, if they got lucky, could have the gabachos as their neighbors. Cousins could claim predominantly "white" high schools as alma maters like Clark, Taft, Marshall, Holmes, rather than the "raza" schools like Burbank, McCollum, Harlandale or mine, Highlands.
My southside identity is an evident reminder my cultural location even here in the midwest, when, working at a cosmetic counter last year to supplement my postdoctoral fellowship, I ran into a white middle-class (and self-proclaimed Christian) woman who mentioned, during small talk, that she too was from San Antonio. (Like OMG!) Of course, the first obligatory question that all San Antonians must ask one another was asked, "What high school did you go to?" When I stated, "Highlands," her chipper demeanor transformed into a sort of perplexed look of, "That's in San Antonio?" I had to quickly follow up with, "It's on the southside." After which she gave a sympathetic oh, you're from the "southside" look. Yeah.
Fast forward to my new position as (the only full-time faculty member) in a Chicano Studies Department at a research one institution in the midwest, where I was asked during my job talk how I would feel teaching Chicano Studies to predominantly white college students. Suppressing my first reaction, which was to yell, "Oh hell no" I simply stated that my pedagogy engaged issues of privilege and marginalization and that I don't subscribe to white neo-liberal definitions of multi-culturalism "i.e., we're all the same...just a different shade!]." Now I'm here in a coveted tenure-track faculty position in hipster town U.S.A. where it's the norm to see on a street corner white dreadlocked, tattoo-covered hipsters "begging" for money for what I call their fuck-you-dad-I'm-not-going-to-be-a-doctor-like-you "spiritual" self-seeking journey, when back home, you see some real homeless raza strung out on hard ass drugs - the only thing that numbs the pain of hopelesness resulting from this government-sanctioned social genocide of our proud and hard-working people.
Everyday I'm forced to ask myself how I, a working class Chicana from a trailer park on the southside of San Antonio, who fights her own daily battles of resentment toward the dominant (read: white and/or middle class) society, approaches this new role of teacher in this racist institution known as academia. My only solace in this position is that I am a strategic infiltrator...bringing the very rare and very real working class Chicana aesthetic into the classroom and the academy at large while, in turn, using my academic position to help educate my working class gente by showing that if I, this chicanita from the southside of San Anto can succeed in the world of higher education, hell, so can you.
