I was sitting at a table in the front yard of a friend’s house in East Los in the middle of the night when I was suddenly filled with a feeling of belonging. It was one of those rare but sacred moments in my life as a Chicana when I felt like I was floating and connecting with something beyond myself, like an out-of-body experience. Everything in the moment was perfect, and nothing could ruin it, not even the helicopter flying above us. I wrote this poem later on as a reflection in response to some of the controversy going on around me about being a Chicana and certain people not wanting to accept what that means and instead distorting it to mean something negative. The distortion is a dangerous lie. I wanted to address that.•
I am not a Chicana who dances
to the beat of Aztlan
I am not a Chicana who picks out a huipil
and poses in front of the mirror/think of abuelita
I am not the right Chicana, I guess.
I’m the Chicana who comes into the panaderia
to find the freshest bolillos
I’m the Chicana who will drink the earliest
morning’s avena to go along with it
I’m the Chicana who falls in love
with a Zapotec principe who once crossed
the border and holds on here
to be able to make it back
I’m the Chicana who
embraces him above the quiet rumbling
of commerce and industry along Olympic
I’m the Chicana who looks out her kitchen window
far off into the mountains of San Gabriel
as the dense fog begins to wrap around them
and dreams of being high up there with you
I’m the Chicana who goes on drives inside this circle they call city
studying it closely about what it could be
I’m not the right Chicana, I guess,
in that I tend to linger on corners to take in
the moments of all that is living before crossing
I’m the Chicana who will be overtaken by the ambrosia
of cumbia and an unspeakable aloneness at the end of the night
in the aroma of the sky and feel soothed
I’m the Chicana who smiles with her eyes
closed in hopes of being kissed or blessed, same thing
Could it be that I am not the right Chicana? Because when I end up in East Los, I am found.
Because I am above the limitations of streets and grids, above the familiar closeness to traffic
and tenor, where I am between the man-made structures below and the helicopter turning its
back toward downtown, where I am found in the vastness of air that reaches between us and
Tenochtitlan
I am not the right Chicana but why do I feel the urge to fly?
I am the kind of Chicana with no land, nowhere, is that the right kind or the wrong kind?
I’m the Chicana who makes sense driving under the fire
volcano and the snow volcano that guards it
both entombed in the Mexican sky but only until she gets back to the city of inmates, quartz,
and hands that clean it.
Wherever I go, I am not a Chicana, though. Just as you are not a Mexican, you are not an immigrant,
you are not anything,
you are visions of madness for the next and the next commander-in-chief of empire, of people that somehow are here, of people who are not here, who cannot be placed here or over there—a nowhere people.
People who contended with the Death Zone, the border, and reappeared here as visions,
clamorings, nightmares of the country’s abyss looking back, but not people—nope never
that. Just transformed.
A transmutation, really.
Into Aztlan-nowhere-anywhere-everywhere—
Into enigma
Into spirit,
roca,
tierra,
rio,
Into the eternal,
(no, not Heaven)
the force behind every hand, same that moves rivers, eats stones, sleeps in soil, the earth
itself knows it, it knows where we look when everything within us is silent and there rings
solitude so loud and true.
I am the Chicana who holds hands with la muerte/just the same/kisses the sun, resting on
the grass.
This poem appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Viva Padilla is a first-generation Chicana poet, magazine editor, publisher, translator, writer, and bookstore owner born and raised in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor in chief of sin cesar, a literary magazine established in 2015 that amplifies Black and Brown voices from our communities, and publishes the magazine and other titles at her bookstore, Re/arte, in the heart of Boyle Heights. She is the author of a chapbook, INSUMISA, and lives with her son on the Eastside.
