By Michael Mendoza

It is important for us to remember who we were, in order for us to learn who we are, what that means, and what it looks like. It is important for us to unveil the secrets in plain sight that reveal how the past has shaped the present and the lessons that are there to guide us into the future. We are not relics but living fossils; beings that encompass the multiplicities and circles of time, we just have to remember we’ve been here before. That is why it is important for the Latinx community to be in solidarity with global indigenous communities and our indigeneity. Who were we before? And whose social and cultural imagination have we been forced to act out?

These guiding questions are at the root of analyzing the oppressive circumstances that exist in our day-to-day interpersonal relations that operate so tacitly and subconsciously we mistake it for truth. But where did these narratives and enforced social castes of Misogyny and Misogynoir, Anti-Black Racism, Asian Hate, Indigenous Invisibility, Homophobia and Anti-Trans Homophobia, Ableism, and the loss of interconnectedness and this disconnection from nature and our world come from? When we ask the questions and do the work, the truth reveals itself. We stand in solidarity when we allow ourselves and others to express in authenticity and love and live as vividly and beautifully as this world we belong to. In honoring ourselves we honor others, and in practicing and acting in truth we are transformational.

Michael Mendoza is an Ethnic and Gender Studies/ Humanities and Communications alumnus from CSUMB (Class of 2022); he is currently the Development and Administrative Manager at the Center for Community Advocacy, a Salinas-based non-profit organization.