Met an older Chicano guy at Home Depot awhile back, and he started talking to me about LA and about Chicano stuff because I had a Suavecito pomade shirt on. He told me that he went to the high school that was in the movie Stand and Deliver. He was a student at that high school when the real events took place, which I thought was really bad ass. He told me, “They thought we couldn’t do Calculus, but we showed them.” This really stuck with me because I thought about my own education situation and how I really did not have to suffer in school (outside of school a different story!) as far as being blatantly discriminated like so many kids of color. I have lighter colored skin so that might have been why, or I lucked out and made it out of the system because I got good grades, hung out with white kids and kept out of trouble. But at the end of the day I was still labeled as a Hispanic because of my last name and could have easily been put in different track in public school because of that. The takeaway from this experience of meeting this veterano was that as Chicano/as, Xicanas, Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Indians, etc we need to continue to educate ourselves, do better for ourselves, keep showing “them” as well as our own people of color/raza and future generations that we are not lower than anyone in anyway and that we do belong.
