The pride within Chicanx culture

Story by Mazey Servin-Obert

---

Traditions and personal experience connect us all to the Chicanx Cultural pride.

Growing up, my father always told me stories of coming to this country to provide a better life for his family. Juan Luis Servin Perez was 14 years old when he left Michoacán, Mexico with his brothers to come to the United States.

After being deported twice when he was 20 and sent back to Mexico in 2004 for 18 months, he would finally accomplish his dream of creating a better life with his wife, Shannon Servin-Obert and daughter. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018. His wife, who struggled through raising a little girl and going to school alone while he was gone, continued to support him and fight for him to be in this country and our life.

As I enter my third year of college at Western as a mixed Mexican-American, I feel the strength of my parents’ sacrifices giving me the opportunity to take on the world.

My story rings true for others just like me; this is what the Mexican community is made of.

Similarly, at 14 years old, Karla Cerna was able to find power in a language that once made the people around her laugh in mockery. She found a match and lit a fire inside herself that was hidden for so long, and the fierce flames gave Karla the strength to stand tall and embrace every part of her that is Chicana.

Cerna, a second-year Western Washington University student, was in middle school when she found pride for her Chicana culture.

Speaking Spanish caused embarrassment for Cerna when she was a child. She thought to herself, “Yeah, never doing that again.” Cerna went to a predominantly white school where most of her friends didn’t look like her.

Some of Cerna’s friends would occasionally make fun of her or look at her funny for speaking Spanish.

After that, Cerna “just tried to act white.” She would do so by dressing the way they did and eating the food they did. She stopped speaking Spanish.

Middle school allowed Cerna the freedom to stop trying to act white. It brought together many different people from different elementary schools. For Cerna, this brought more people that were Mexican-American like her. Having friends who grew up with the same background added fuel to a faint, yet burning, fire.

“I’m lucky to even be Chicana,” Cerna said. “We are a big community of people and I feel like you have this different connection with other people like that … I’m Mexican and I love it.”

Meeting people who come from the same background as Cerna brings a sense of community.

“I feel like I know them, I feel like I’m not alone,” Cerna said.

Cerna started to enjoy her culture more by attending parties like quincerñeras, a coming-of-age celebration for a girl’s 15th birthday, where she would dance and enjoy time with her friends who shared her background. For Cerna, dancing was a way to show her pride for her Chicana culture because it was a way to truly connect with the culture.

This wasn’t always the case, not just for Cerna, but for the entire Chicanx community. Historial their has been discrimination against Mexican and Mexican-American within society.

Educating Change: Latina Activsim and Struggle for Educational Equity is a student research project that was sponsored by the John Nicholas Brown Center and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. The project gives tribute to troubles Mexican Americans faced for educational equity and bilingual education. Contributors and creators for the project from Brown University looked at the history of the Chicano Movement as well as examining their history in Coachella Valley. Another aspect of the research involved the life of three Mexican and Chicana women.

Before the 1960s, “Chicano” was a discriminatory term used against the Mexican-American community. However, it turned into a word of empowerment for “pride within one’s Mexican heritage.”

The Chicano Movement acted as an umbrella over multiple movements taking place at this time, such as worker’s rights and youth discrimination in schools.

A group that came out of the movement in high schools and universities in the 1960s was Movimiento Estudantil Chicano de Aztlán (MeChA), or “Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan,” in English.

These groups allowed other people who identified as Chicanx to find people like them and fight discrimination.

However, even without groups like MeChA, a sense of community that lingers with people from a Chicanx or Mexican background is ingrained in the culture.

Even when people of Mexican heritage don’t know each other, they tend to stick together. Even the simplest visits to the store can become troublesome when language barriers start to surface. When Karla Gallegos worked at Target people would come to her when they had a Spanish- speaking customer.

Gallegos finds pride in being able to help people from her same background just by speaking the same language. The connections created without knowing each other’s stories but sharing a language express a connection between them, like the way rivers connect to the ocean. Gallegos connected with the Hispanic population in Mount Vernon through her job at Target.

“Anyone that would go to Target would ask me for help or my opinion even though I didn’t know them,” Gallegos said. “Being at the register I would give them a discount. I care about them even though I didn’t know them because we kind of come from the same background.”

While there is a strong sense of community, there also is a strong sense of family.

Wine red liquid from the roselle flower to make agua de jamaica. Enchiladas cooking and parents getting to see their son again for the first time in 25 years. These are the occasions that bring family and community together. After Karina Avalos-Reyna, a fourth year Central Washington University student, visited her grandparents in Mexico, it inspired them to apply for their visas.

After receiving their visas it allowed them to see their son after 25 years. Avalos-Reyna’s father came to the United States at a young age to work to help provide for his family in Mexico. He had to stop attending school and become a provider.

“This closeness … I definitely do believe it happens to other people with this heritage, because it is pretty common that many individuals come to the U.S for a better future for their children,” Avalos-Reyna said.

Avalos-Reyna got to celebrate her father’s birthday with her family all together for the first time in 25 years. Family is what drives the fire within the Chicanx community and Mexican-American culture. Avalos-Reyna says seeing her father happy brings a sense of warmth.

“I felt that there was a warm connection between my grandparents and my father after not seeing each other for so long. It felt very warm that my father was able to see them in the U.S,” Avalos-Reyna said.

The family-oriented culture behind being Mexican is something that creates a feeling of solid family that will be there no matter what happens.

The Avalos-Reyna family creates a support system due to the culture of being family-oriented. It has allowed her to feel supported throughout her education at Central Washington University.

“I think it is really important to me because if we didn’t have [family] I would feel hopeless and I wouldn’t complete as many [accomplishments],” Avalos-Reyna said.

While Avalos-Reyna makes agua de jamaica during her family events, Gallegos’ family spends hours cooking tamales for occasions like birthdays and holidays. Gallegos remembers smelling the winter candy apples and tamales during the holidays and watching her mother spread the masa into the corn husk and filling them with salsa roja and pork.

“Our food is something that brings me a lot of pride.” Gallegos said, “Especially to güeros, one thing I normally do is cook tamales with my mom and we either take them to my workplace or my boyfriend’s workplace and we always get back great comments or ask for more orders.”

Mexican food is full of favor and this comes from it being homemade and cooking for hours.

Americanized Mexican restaurants don’t bring a lot of pride for Gallegos. Mexican food from those types of restaurants are like people that dress up in sombrero and poncho, Gallegos said. Authentic Mexican food comes from home and requires a lot of someone’s time and effort.

“It makes me feel more proud that I can have that actually authentic food made by my mom,” Gallegos added.

The authentic food connects to the authentic culture because the amount of time people put into cooking is the same amount of time and effort they do in other aspects of their life. Food connects a community because when they cook they bring everyone together.

Being Chicano, Chicana and Chicanx is someone of Mexican descent that was born in the United States and who are usually first generation American born citizens. “Chicanx” is used for those who are gender non-binary and is a way to represent intersectionality within the community. The term “Chicano’’ is used for males and the term Chicana is used for females.

These are the technical definitions of what Chicanx is but the culture is more than that, it is a way of life that is part of who the people are.

“It’s not something I think about everyday . . . it’s who I am, ” Gallegos said.