Huipil

Peace Freshyouth:
I come with a small offering by which you may get to know a little more about who I am. Today, I am 28 years young, daughter of las Americas, and mother to the new world. I am the youngest of three children the only one born in the U.S. I am a mother of two toddlers, Metzonalli and Citlali, my sun and earth, and companera to my love for 9 years. My parents migrated here in 1979 and 1980. My dad came first, determined to provide a better life for my two older brothers and my mom. My mom later followed, overwhelmed by a 25 year civil war that raged in her homeland and threatened her family. I grew up in San Jose, the only Nicaraguan-Guatemalan-Belizean I knew. I graduated from high school in 2001 and went to San Francisco State University where I received a bachelor’s in Social Science with and emphasis in Ethnic Studies. I graduate from SFSU in 2005 and moved to the Boston area for a year to complete a Masters program at Tufts University in Secondary Education History. Nothing in my traditional schooling really prepared me to be in front of you all. The students I’ve worked with for almost 15 years have all shaped who I am as an ally and educator to young people. For the time that you decide to know me you will hear many stories but today I offer two small stories about who I am.
Nothing about my life was normal. Although, at this point I know that normal doesn’t really exist. Normal is made-up. Somebody probably gets paid the big bucks to sit around in a room all day and think up ways to trick us into believing lies. I know they tricked me and sometimes they still do. Sometimes I catch myself believing lies until someone snaps me out of it. Have you ever felt like that? Like the moment everything was starting to make sense it stopped and nothing else was ever the same or at least exactly the same as it was before.
The first time I felt like that was when I was playing outside. I was five years old and it wasn’t often that my mom let me out. She didn’t trust the neighbors. Was weary of the drugged up fathers of friends. Brothers of friends that had curious hands. It was on one of the rare occasions that my friends and I were playing on the corner taking turns on a jump rope. We saw a man stumbling across a grassy area clutching his abdomen his face a mixture of agony and sorrow. Sadly in pain. He didn’t make it to the corner, collapsed onto the ground like a sack of potatoes, let go of his pain and bled on the concrete eyes fixed on the sky seeing himself reflected in the blue opacity above. He was pronounced dead on the scene once the police arrived. I felt sick ran home to get my parents to hide behind the safety of our security door and barred windows. Prayed for myself to leave myself and fly away to a place where safety wasn’t defined by the construction of cages and barriers or violence and fear.
I regularly sat in church with my mom. Shortly, after my mom had me she started studying with Jehovah Witnesses. She was looking for community, isolated now that she’d come to El Norte from Guatemala she wanted to make sure we had some stability in our lives. An alcoholic father is volatile and unpredictable. Church is not. I grew up reading the bible and attending bible study in Spanish. I learned to speak, write, and read in Spanish here. I remember one day I was maybe 9 when I asked my mom why I didn’t have the same privileges as my brother. I yearned to pass out microphones, lead a prayer, or distribute books and magazines. I coveted the independence that they so naively accepted as normal and couldn’t stand the thought of having to sit one more minute quiet, complacent, and invisible. My mothers eyes burned a hole through me, as they often did whenever I challenged G-d, and simply replied “Porque eso dice la biblia”. I’ll never forget that day, not because it was traumatic or painful. It was at most disappointing. But, at that moment I knew I wanted to know more so I’d never have to rely on someone else’s interpretation to define my life.
My childhood was full of secrets. I hid myself often from my family because I never quite fit in. I was always too loud, too curious, too eccentric for those around me. I also hid myself from my friends afraid of the weirdness of my family and mind. I hid my intelligence and often acted as if I knew less than I actually did. I knew by the time I was in high school that I needed an out. I couldn’t come to terms with the life so many of my peers chose. I didn’t want to get baptized, get married, praise Jehovah 3 times a week at church, and follow blindly. I didn’t want to see my dad come home so drunk he had to crawl through the house to get to his room. I couldn’t imagine myself having a baby with a boy from church or the neighborhood my imagination was too wild to be tamed by a man. I had no idea who I’d become but I knew more than anything that I wanted to decide what that was. I wasn’t going to let anyone else choose my path for me. I was going to do something different because anything else would have killed my spirit.
I have many stories to tell. Some small, some gigantic, but all of these stories weave together my huipil. The huipil is the blouse that Maya women wear. It is an intricate story of their lives, identities, communities, each color, each symbol, each stitch represents a part of their universe. When the Maya woman puts on the huipil it symbolizes their position at the center of the cosmos as creator and keeper of the stories, of life. I sometimes wear a huipil as a reminder to myself to take my place, to tell my stories, to (re)create my universe. I always keep my huipil within adding with each of you a new stitch, a new story, a new symbol. I thank you for being here and for trusting me enough to let me into your lives. I am humbled by your stories and look forward to hearing them as we start a new journey together this year that may or may not last a life time but will definitely (re)shape both our worlds as we know them.

Ashé,
Mama Alaghom