My professor had given me the microphone to talk about my artwork and how Gloria Anzaldua had influenced me. I tried forgetting his words but I could not. I do not remember everything I said that day because my mind spoke without first stopping to think about it. It came out of me. I knew if I kept it inside my muscles would start to tremble and I would go to sleep that night angry and wake up angry for a couple of weeks.
I talked about my experience of waiting in line to get my permanent residence card and how it took more than ten years to get it. I heard and saw people clap but I do not know if it was for approval or pity. My anger did not go away.
Aida Hurtado talked in this year El Retorno conference about leaving your body and how Anzaldua talked about this concept. Hurtado mentioned that she could have written thirty book if she had controlled her anger. She found that making someone angry leaves the person being only a body without its mind.
I never want to be again only a body. How about if someone cries? Are they only a body too?
Along with Rodney Gomez and Isaac Chavarria, I participated to create a chapbook for El Retorno: Our Serpent's Tongue. I curated the exhibition at the event and even talked without breaking up about the chapbook. My professor Emmy Perez again encouraging me to talk.
This time the message was different. I talked about one of my students who told me, "Miss, Why are you here?" The student had at the time a tone of disgust. This student, in fact, had been disgusted all week long about peers and making awful comments about the Mexican culture to the point that I lectured them every single day on the subject of valuing their culture. When I was picking out artwork for the chapbook and going to meetings about this conference, I thought about my students. I had taught my students everyday to write and draw their own history because I did not want them to wake up one day and dislike what someone else wrote about them. More so, to be looked upon for something they disapproved.
I made two drawings that were given to be given to Lauren Espinoza, a poet leaving the Rio Grande Valley to study her Master's in Arizona this fall and Norma Cantu, a Chicano writer.
I cried when I explained to Norma the meaning of my drawing. I don't know if I should have hold it in and talked more about my artwork. But, the moment I could not speak any more and I started to cry, my whole life flashed by in an instant. It was the sensation people say you get when you are about to die. I realized then why I had made it.
