our pulse Archives

La India y La Negrx: Intentional, Radical Love in My Queer Interracial Relationship

Welcome to Autostraddle’s queer Latinx essay series: Our Pulse. In honor of celebrating Latinxs during Hispanic Heritage Month, Autostraddle curated a collection of essays by lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans Latina and Latinx writers to showcase our experiences, our pulse.

I’m a 25-year-old queer, first generation Mexi-Salvadoreña, brown and hairy mestiza femme born on the east coast and living in Tejas. I share a life with a Black gender non-conforming partner who was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and who is transforming through their masculinity. We have been together four years as an interracial queer couple in a small primarily white town in North Texas. My partner is a talented body worker, jazz-loving fashionista musician, and I am a llorona pero chingona radical traveling poeta, maestra, and spiritual [art]ivista.

Around year two of our relationship, I playfully began tagging our dynamic and distinct duo as La India Y La Negrx on social media. Initially I did this as a way of documenting our beautiful and radical presence in the world (yay for the power of internet selfies and visibility politics!). Four years and countless “likes” later, our journey as #LaIndiaYLaNegrx in a white supremacist hetero patriarchal reality has grown from playful and self-affirming forms of visibility to a humbling and often times painful series of lessons on the radical decolonizing power of love and emotional literacy.

Photo by TL Ortiz. Edyka and her partner, Amari.

Like many other radical queer muxeres mestizas my journey into queerness was not graceful. I had no road maps, little support or mentorship, and little understanding of what was possible and what was to come from this courageous and intentional act of choosing love in such a radically beautiful form. To this day, I only recall two conversations ever had with my family of origin about queerness prior to me coming out. One was me being bold enough to ask my mother what she felt about gay marriage. Her response was that she believed marriage was only for a man and a woman. End of conversation. The second experience was with my father who, thinking himself very liberal and tolerant, explained that everyone will make their own choices; he just felt it was important that those choices happened behind closed doors and not in his face. Of course neither of these conversations stopped my queer little heart from committing to marrying a gender non-conforming person and living my choices out in the open.

Beyond this casual yet intentional dismissal of queerness, it was hard not to notice the overall aversion my families of origin had to difference in general. I still remember my tia telling me not to take interest in my cousins’ Guatemalan male friend because we would find a good Salvadorian boy for me soon enough. I imagine this was my tia’s attempt to somehow correct my father’s scandalous choice to marry and have children with a dark-skinned Mexican woman. Along with casual colorism known to many of us Latinxs and other POC, the unapologetic anti-Blackness was never missing from the dinner conversation when race was discussed. This was especially true whenever I came home from college and spoke passionately and genuinely on the need for Black and Brown people to stand in solidarity with one another. I did this loyally, only to encounter repeatedly the oversimplified myth of Black people not wanting to work while having all the privileges of citizenship and language access. This never failed to be accompanied by the story of that one time tal y tal was jumped down the street coming home from work by a group of morenos who stole his hard-earned money y “que esa gente pasan todo el dia tomados y usando drogas viviendo gratis del gobierno”. Ah, if they only they knew I was joining those morenos on summer daze in the projects down the street flowing over instrumentals and talking politics.

Yet as expected, over the years my cousins have married and procreated with other straight-identified Salvadorian or Salvadorian-Americans (usually at least as light or lighter-skinned than themselves) that come from decent hardworking families and have managed to have pretty stable lives living close to the extended family unit. Three generations in my immigrant family has transitioned pretty seamlessly to the American Dream and all that it has to offer. Now to be sure, I respectfully recognize that cultural enclaves, strong conservative family bonds, and the maintaining of cultural traditions have been vital for survival, conservation, and even resistance of many Latinx immigrant families in the U.S. Yet as a queer mujer it is imperative for me to name and recognize the ways these things have been deeply violent for many of us that dare to seek and uncover the unknown and/or the unsaid.

If I have learned anything living in this reality, it’s that the tools that come from resisting Eurocentric forms of assimilation allows us the freedom to heal, remember, and grow as a people that have inherited 500+ years of colonization and war. We grow when we resist, we resist when we believe another reality is possible. We must help one another live beyond fear into that belief. We must affirm for one another that we can change our realities one act of courage at a time.

Nothing has made this more apparent to me than my choice to invite transparent and intentionally radical love into my life in the form of my partner. By doing this I have actively rejected the idea that a conservative light skin or white middle class man will save me. By doing this, I have taken the time to uncover/remember that Black and Brown two-spirit bodies have been walking with each other since before Columbus and other European colonists invaded our lands. I have reclaimed the stories that tell us we have shared sacred prayers, knowledge, and medicine for thousands of years; we have stood together in war, and we continue to stand, fall, and walk together still.

I was in Oakland, California when I learned about the massacre at the Pulse nightclub. By then I had spent the summer mourning daily the new names of black and brown bodies that were being assassinated all over this country. I sat in a qpoc meditation circle (because The Bay) in which we took turns telling each other we were sad, angry, and over all disconnected and confused about what we were feeling or what we thought we should be feeling. It was a collective sigh of desperation that there may be no room for love in our lives seemingly dictated by fear and death. This I felt was the most violent part of all.

Above all things, I have come to believe there must be room for serious consideration of love as a political strategy and resilience practice in the lives of queer people resisting ongoing colonization and genocide. Yet such love requires intentional and constant work, just like any other activist organizing strategy.

Choosing to live unapologetically in a queer interracial relationship amidst the timeless reality of Trump politics in the South has meant choosing to be courageous. It has meant intentionally delving into the ways historical and present day trauma has stunted and damaged my perceptions of self and my capacity to love without the assistance of whiteness or cis maleness. I struggle daily with the manifestations of personal trauma that affect my day to day ability to be kind, compassionate, patient, confident, vulnerable, and nurturing in my relationship. These are all skills I now know are necessary to maintain a loving and healthy partnership. These are all also skills that have been affected by multiple forms of violence. From internalized self-hate rooted in racism and homophobia, to emotional neglect, to alcoholism; the genealogies of trauma are revealing of the ways many of us have unlearned the power of love for more then seven generations.

Over these four years I have yelled different versions of “I don’t need this shit, I’m leaving!” many times over. I have done this only to humbly come back and uncover my visceral responses as manifestations of past experiences. Choosing my relationship with my partner meant choosing to intentionally be committed to this painful work (yay for counseling, literary resources like bell hooks, and long conversations with supportive friends!). I have come to understand that the emotional labor required of me in this relationship is endless and all encompassing. It means learning to understand my oppression as a mestiza mujer and also learning how to work through my anti-Blackness and be an ally to my Black gender-nonconforming partner. This has been truly painful, messy, and overwhelming. Yet at the end of the day, it’s the work I believe truly matters. This is healing work that I choose to do for myself, my beloved, my community, and the lineage of mujeres behind me and in front of me that are hungry for love and reconciliation of the violence that surrounds us.

Yet, as romantic as it sounds to engage love and partnership as a political practice, I would argue it might be the most difficult form of activism. At the end of the day there is nowhere to hide, no room to make excuses and justifications, no email to send that might buy you time. Love as activism for qpoc requires a great deal of humility, painful honesty, and endless courage on the most personal of all levels. It’s the ultimate form of accountability that I have encountered in my living. It requires you to take inventory of the things you have avoided in your life, the things you never had words for or the courage to sort through. It requires you to own up to your choices, your words, your action on and off screens, on and off microphones or megaphones. Love in partnership as colonized/racialized bodies is courageously undressing the walls we have built to survive and showing others the chaos that war has left behind.

By Pam Buchunam

I by no means claim to be an expert on this work or even greatly successful at it. I say this as I recall all the past and recent heartbreaking situations where I failed at embodying the politics of decolonizing love with people I truly care about. However, if you were to ask me now what I am most proud of I would tell you it is my dream to continue becoming a person I never saw or imagined I could be: a mujer free and whole, emotionally stable and grounded, living in love that is inexhaustible and without condition. As far as I can tell, these desire are not included in the makings of a fabricated “American Dream”. The dream that my parents so desperately hoped would save me. Yet ironically there is nothing like standing on the intersections of everything this country hates only to realize what this country or any other historically white institution is not capable of giving you: love. Love is something we must be courageous enough to choose for ourselves.

Somos Familia: Showing Up For Our Queer Family in the Rio Grande Valley

by Angélica Becerra

I looked down our guapango line and realized why the night was so special. We were in the middle of Queerceañera, a fundraiser for the queer people of color conference Aquí Estamos, and normally I don’t expect to have fun at events I help organize, but this was a first.

We went on into the hot, summer night with our tejano line-dancing, old and young folks sweating as we circled around the dance floor, and I felt as whole as I have managed to in almost nine years. Finally I got to be unapologetically queer amongst this familia that came together in the face of rejection from the homes we came from or by the systems that governed us in the US/Mexico border community that is the Rio Grande Valley.

Aquí Estamos organizers with trans activist Isa Noyola

I had learned to compartmentalize myself when I was amongst my blood family, due to their rejection of my queerness when I was outed when I was 16. After the fights and tears and trips to the priest, I accepted that maybe harmonious family just wasn’t going to be a thing for me if I was going to try to be my authentic self. Even now, at 24, we skirt around topics that neither of us want to face, a dance we’ve learned and have become accustomed to.

But here I was dancing with mi familia, maybe not the people who raised me, but definitely people who have helped me grow.

In Latinx culture, our families become something that grounds us. Unfortunately, if our families reject our queerness, we start to look at these ties as chains that become binding. Turning your back on them is an option, but not usually one that is made easily. And if you’re financially dependent on your family, as so many of us are, it becomes a question of being yourself or getting to eat or having access to medical care or having somewhere to live.

Fortunately for queer folks in the Valley, we’re getting organized so that we have to stop making these choices. Aquí Estamos, the conference, can be described as a byproduct of what several years of queer and intersectional organizing in the Valley has created.

The Rio Grande Valley, the South-most part of Texas, is on the border of Mexico and sees immigrants from all parts of Latin America come through. In some cases, the RGV is the first stop on an immigrant’s trip before they get to another part of the US. In other cases, due to government checkpoints that surround the areas north of the Rio Grande Valley, we see folks becoming stuck in our area. This can lead to a lot of understandably ill feelings towards a place that many people, including myself, have decided to make their homes.

Aquí Estamos was born out of this idea that instead of criticizing the endless list of reasons that make the Valley a bad place for a queer immigrant, we can try to make it better for all of us. At first, this meant through a free annual queer people of color conference, but we realized that our movement needs to happen year-round. We also recognized that the only approach was a holistic one, which meant that if we didn’t find solutions that encompassed a person’s entire identity, then we had to go back to the drawing board and try again.

“Many folks who turn to Aquí Estamos, statistically, have a lot of issues,” said Alex B, an Aquí Estamos organizer. “Living on the frontera it’s almost unavoidable. Any organization that is attempting to do meaningful work in the Valley or somewhere like the Valley, will not be successful without an intersectional approach. Cultural identities, immigration status and citizenship, gender, income — everybody has different privileges and oppressions that they face.”

Aquí Estamos members at a Greg Abbott protest

Personally, working with Aquí Estamos was my attempt at redemption for all the years I had spent as a teenager harboring resentment towards my home. Some of that resentment was understandable, since the RGV was where my traumas had originated, but I realized later that organized Catholic religion bore most of the responsibility for why my queerness was rejected by my blood-kin. I figured that there might be another queer 15-year-old running around my hometown who might have it worse than I did, and instead of telling them that they can eventually move away, which might be true only if they have the means or papers to do so, we can try to build something meaningful together.

This year was the second conference, and we saw attendance double within a year. More importantly, the conference, held at South Texas College’s Cooper Center, was free and accessible for the entire community, and was funded entirely by the community itself. Fundraisers like Queerceañera, a take on the traditional quinceañera or 15th birthday party, or online donation drives saw members of the community throw their resources together so that spaces like Aquí Estamos could exist.

Besides Aquí Estamos, which is relatively new, organizations that already existed have been stepping up to the plate of trying to alleviate the issues created by rampant poverty that faces our queer, border community.

The Valley Aids Council, which is the only HIV outpatient agency serving the 1.3 million that makes up the RGV are now seeing about four new patients every week due to the rise of HIV infection along the border. Their staff is also representative of the population they’re serving, including HIV advocate, educator and writer Adrian Castellanos who started creating profiles on dating apps like Grindr and Tinder to educate other users in the RGV about HIV prevention after being diagnosed with the virus himself.

dani-and-sam-protest-against-greg-abbott

Aquí Estamos organizer Dani Marrero and Sam Herrera at a protest

“To give someone that news that quite literally changes their life takes a huge toll but if I can help them in any single way — be it with physical health, mental health, emotional support — I’m gonna try,” Castellanos said at his keynote address at Aquí Estamos 2016 in August. “I remember how badly I needed someone in my time of crisis. And how I didn’t have someone to turn to, someone that truly understood what I was going through.”

Other organizations like Pride Home are a direct response to a need seen amongst the queer community in the RGV for emergency housing. Made up of a group of advocates and members of the community to create a shelter for LGBTQ youth in the RGV, it would be the only LGBTQ shelter since there currently isn’t any in the four counties that make up this area. RGV Trans Support is also a grassroots support group made up of trans and gender variant persons throughout the RGV. With a tight-knit online community and physical meetings, this organization was a direct response to the trans community’s need for accessible mental health services in our largely medically underserved area.

There are also organizations that don’t have queer and trans-centric missions but are using the platforms they do have to help bridge gaps between the rest of the community with queer and trans issues. Local leaders and allies from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Las Poderosas, have hosted LGBTQ 101 events in Spanish for families who might have questions about their queer and trans kids, an ongoing project that helps us bridge generational gaps and prove that homophobia is not an inherent quality of Latinx culture.

While we’re working on creating these formal spaces, the ability to find housing or healthcare for people without actual formal resources is a marker of how tight and scrappy our community can be when we need each other, and a characteristic of what organizing among queer and trans Latinxs is and needs to be.

“It is very beneficial that all these organizations hold each other up, because we hold each other accountable and we also encourage and challenge each other, and we grow with each other to create an even better network to better serve the community here in the Valley,” said Alex B. “You find your gente, and you start building your family of sorts. It doesn’t completely erase any struggles that we face, but it certainly makes them much simpler to bear when you know you have someone to lean on and someone to lean on you.”

We’ve started to heal the wounds left by rejection from families and fill in the holes left by government neglect and financial stability. We show up for one another when we need it porque somos familia, and that’s just what we do.

Queer Latinx Love is Resistance: A Collection of Vignettes

feature image by Raquel Breternitz

by Angélica Becerra

Our love can be beautiful and dramatic like telenovelas. Our love is inherently sacred by unlearning the toxic ideas of who and what is desirable, though sometimes internalized oppression can still plague our relationships. It wouldn’t be authentic to portray the glory of our love without the bitter tastes as well.

Latinx love in times of crises and revolution is resistance. I love that our love grows with pain into beauty, like thorny rositas in their natural state.

Here’s a bouquet of love notes to old and recent loves.

It was my first quarter at university. I found you on Grindr, or maybe Adam4Adam. I’m pretty sure I subtly begged you to fuck me, and I’m pretty sure I believed you would be nicer than you were. I craved your attractive, beautiful, round face. Validation that an ugly creature like me could be adored by something as precious as you. Your brown dominated mine. Not a piece of you felt or sounded like home. I found solace when you left and I began to love myself, and you, for being hurt in different ways that led us to this regretful moment. I hope we find better love and lovers.

ii.

You were the first organizer to leave class with me because I was having a panic attack. You came to my dorm and held me in my twin bed because I asked for what I needed. You saw something hurt and something beautiful in me. I saw your hands and spirit as healing ancestral magic. Memory that somewhere along our lineages, we loved each other. You had familiar full lips, that brown pink that is nameless in color but unforgettable in sight. Long dark hair, dark eyes, face kissed by beauty marks. Our bodies similar in texture, smooth in many places, soft fur in the few crevices it did grow. How I loved touching you, being enveloped in home. Sleeping with you felt like being baked into fresh pan dulce. Coming with you felt like abuelita chocolate dripping down my body, pouring into your mouth. How delicious those two short weeks were. How savory I hold this memory.

iii.

Something about your ugly brought out my own. We summoned our demons and watched them play with each other, sinking venomous fangs into each other’s flesh to see who would paralyze first and quit this evil. Neither of us did. We were uglies who desired white beauties. Settled for each other, upset with each other, hurting each other, using each other. What did we walk away with? The scum of the river, foggy car windows, poems we didn’t read to each other, tasteless jokes, clothes drenched in pool water, and a sour taste of cum.

iv.

During my second puberty, dating you felt like high school. Wrapping blunts in your race car, listening to The Weeknd, playing Five Nights at Freddy’s, making out, you always inching your hand up my skirt to feel my throbbing dick, me always grabbing you by the back of the neck for deeper kisses. Interrupted by your parent’s phone calls, hearing you tell them “Estoy con mi amiga” at night but becoming amigo by early morning. The times you called me princesa, chula, then slipped up with the occasional chulo. It hurt on a children-and-grandchildren-of-Mexican-immigrants level, where that -o and -a are significantly more affirming than English can be. Yet, I appreciate you for those late nights you brought me In-N-Out and demonstrated your DJ skills. I love that we shared intimacy in brown Caló queer languages, that you made me feel young and silly, that you grew into someone better than who you were before me.

Girl, you make me hate my memory loss when it often serves as a protective shield. There’s nothing more I want to remember than every moment and sensation we shared. Our grinding hips at Queer Cumbia, feeling your drunken sweat drip onto my freshly implanted tits. The way we sloppily made out and smeared our red and burgundy lips all over our mouths, noses, forehead, and neck. Maneuvering into the club bathroom, laughing as we used a half dozen wet paper towels to clean ourselves, taking selfies for the #tbt, for the story, for the hotness of Mexi trans girls sexually into one another. Grinding and making out with your partner, sandwiching and being sandwiched between Black and brown sexual intensity with anticipating fingers, tongues, hips, and erections. All of us in bed together, whispering, sharing stories, boundaries, and STI & HIV status. Fucking so good without any of the penetration, feeling in love with my body in all its hairy trans glory, in love with all the smells of lust and spit, hearing mami and baby and more and fuck yes and please and stop and that was so fucking good. ‘Cuz it was, really fucking good.

vi.

Our love was the definition of what-the-f*ck, but you’re just a Scorpio and I’m just an empath who can feel right through your bullshit. I know you love me, and I wasn’t afraid to tell you that I wanted to build love with you. There was room for our learning, together. Yet I was caught in that bind as I am with most men, knowing your good, gentle-natured heart is deterred by machismo bullshit of what you should do. To be fair, you wanted something slow and I wanted something sure. I wasn’t sure cis people could genuinely love me like they would a cis woman, though now I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if I know that answer. Love is flexible and ever-changing, like us, from romance to hot sex to indifference. I am grateful for what we learned, knowing that I won’t be repeating you or relationships like ours.

vii.

I couldn’t date you three years ago when I didn’t love trans women, but I gave it a shot this year when I knew I could. Being with you was a reprieve from the onslaught of internalized baggage I learned to carry. Being with you taught me to be present in my body, how to cherish silence as bonding when the person you’re with is breathing in sync with you. I won’t forget you icing my sore chichis or rubbing that calendula and beeswax salve onto my incision scars, then offering to give me head when I couldn’t even sit up on my own. How you treated me and my body as a blessing, unveiling mirrors that allowed me to love myself deeper. You healed me in body and love, though in our relationship I mostly took from you, felt like I was fracking your resources until I depleted us. I broke up with you because I wasn’t ready to grow. Now in our friendship, I want to give you all the love I couldn’t when romance blurred me from seeing what a true lover you were.

Birth of The Nintendo Generation

by Angélica Becerra

“We came to this country to conduct ourselves as freemen…We wish to be free and not slaves, and we wish to be under a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” –Kimberly Alidio, from after projects the resound

I was born in the year 1981, the year MTV launched. The year Ronald Reagan became president. The year the US-trained Atlacatl battalion massacred over 800 people in El Mozote, a pueblo in El Salvador. It was the end of the Iran Hostage Crisis. It was the beginning of the Iran-Contra Affair. Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike and died in prison. The first recognized case of AIDS is reported in Los Angeles. The list could go on and on… but this is not an American pastoral. Or a lyric. Or anything except a history of violence. I am only a narrator. So let’s start there. I was born in 1981, in the month of February, in the year of the rooster, in the United States of Reagan.

I grew up a mile from the cemetery in a small Texas town. Death was my neighbor. Raised by gusty winds, by dust and caliche, and by bodies, the bodies my father brought home, the ones he tossed onto our kitchen table. He worked as an emergency medical tech, driving the ambulance, answering 911 calls, savings lives, watching them extinguish. The bodies he brought into the house on Front street decomposed in our home, buried next to the Southwestern art deco in my living room. The bodies never smelled. They never spoke. But I knew their stories. Sometimes personally. Sometimes I attended their funerals. I would spend sleepless nights looking out at the distant light from the cemetery, through my bedroom window. I stared out into the moon’s kingdom, at the invisibleness, just to avoid looking at the ones haunting the shadows in my house.

It was 1998 when James Byrd Jr. was lynched in Jasper, Texas during the summer. I was a senior in high school. The fall of that same year, Matthew Shepard was beaten in a cornfield in Laramie, Wyoming. It was the end of my innocence when I realized that being Black or being Queer in this country could get you killed. This was the time before Hurricane Katrina, before 9/11, before Ferguson. Before. Before. Before.

1998 was the first time I heard the phrase “hate crime.” As if suddenly, to hate had become a crime in a country founded on violence. But would the phrase have entered our lexicon had Shepard not been white? Would the murder of James Byrd, Jr been enough to enact the hate crime legislation that was passed in 2009, more than 10 years after their murders?

In 1999, before I graduated high school, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shocked our nation. From 1999 to 2007, there were seven mass shootings (that I could find), leading up to the Virginia Tech massacre. And there were 20 from 2007 until 2012, when Adam Lanza opened fire on Sandy Hook. There have been five since then. Two of them are hate crimes. White supremacist Dylan Roof killed nine Black church members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, hoping to spark a race war. The most recent mass shooting of Pulse Nightclub, where 49 people of color, most of them Puerto Rican, most of them LGTBQ, were killed by a shooter with an assault weapon, a Sig Sauer MCX. If the Federal Assault Weapons ban of 1994 had still been in affect or had Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban bill passed after the Sandy Hook shooting, then perhaps Pulse shooter Omar Mateen might not have been able to legally obtain his gun. We won’t ever know.

All of these years I mention have been years of extreme violence. And I left many years out. 1991. 2001, 2005. Really, just about every year of my life. I was born into a country at war, both abroad and at home. Millennials have not known a time of peace in this world, much less in this country. I left out many other names, deaths, heroes. Not to forget them, but because I was supposed to write about Pulse. I was asked to write about what it means to be Queer and Latinx in the United States. And all of these moments, these losses, the grief, are a part of my queerness. Just as much as the joy, the celebration, the love is. I am writing beyond pain, but cannot write without it. It is part of our legacy — as is violence. Violence on an institutional level. Violence on a physical level. Violence on a spiritual level.

2015 was supposed to have been a red letter year for the LGTBQ community. The gays could marry! Obergefell v Hodges legalized gay marriage in the United States the same year that was also the deadliest on record for transgender Americans. In the U.S., 23 trans women were murdered. And those are the deaths that were reported. 2016 isn’t over yet, and already 21 trans women have been murdered (most of them were trans women of color and the majority were Black). I can’t erase the image of undocumented trans activist Jennicet Gutierrez questioning President Barack Obama during a speech where he was recognizing the LGTBQ community and the progress made after the Supreme Court handed down the decision. Gutierrez said, “In the tradition of how Pride started, I interrupted his speech because it is time for our issues and struggles to be heard.” After being silenced and escorted out, she also said, “It is heartbreaking to see how raising these issues were received by the president and by those in attendance.” 2015 was a victory for some. But for others, it was just a reminder of how far we still have to go.

It’s been 15 years since a second word entered my vocabulary: terrorism. But it was the US government that created and defined that word – that use that word, both here and abroad, on the lands far away from us. The media may say otherwise, but our country birthed that word. (Look back at media coverage of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, 1995 or of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, 1993) Just a day after this past 9/11, the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, the mosque attended by Pulse shooter Omar Mateen, was set on fire. It is not coincidence that someone attacked the building, a symbol of a religion that is misunderstood and hated, on one of the holiest days – Eid al-Adha. Since the Pulse shooting, there have been a growing list of anti-Islamic hate crimes occurring across the country. A Muslim woman wearing a hijab was set on fire standing outside a Valentino store on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan several weekends ago. She survived; but survival is the exception, not the rule. These are just a few examples of how hate crimes have continued to terrorize our country. Terrorism is not a foreign concept. It is post 9/11.

I sat in an audience recently, at a small bookstore in Austin, Texas, to hear queer poet Kimberly Alidio read from her new book, after projects the resound (Black Radish). The lines from one poem, “Blessed be/our ugly grief/our helpless beauty/this very moment of utterance incarnate in an absent brown body/joining us/alive painfully so/strand us alone together” have lingered in my mind since then, as I reflected upon Pulse. The poem ends with “LOL OUR TENDER EMOTIONALITY.” As if amid all the violence, the hate, the brutality and the savagery, we could still be tender and emotional. I don’t want my generation’s legacy to be that of hate, of racism, of homophobia, of Islamophobia, of terror, of genocide, of war, of civil unrest, of police brutality, of climate change, of revelation. I do not want the legacy to be the grief, the bodies, the ghosts, I have witnessed in my lifetime, as a child born of the Nintendo Generation. I am tired of death, of bodies, of hate upon hate.

This essay is a pulse, beating loud in a body, where tender emotionality can exist, where violence will not. This is what Pulse has meant for me. It is a moment when we can transform a tragedy born of hate into ash. We have to be ready to be stranded alone, together. To protect each other. To dream and to rebuild. Like I said, this is not a pastoral. This is not a lyric. Christopher Marlowe didn’t write The Passionate Shepherd to His Love for me. For us. There is nothing bucolic about being queer or brown in the US – but there is something tremendous and glorious about it. Because despite all of it, we are still here. All of this, all of this, is leading us somewhere, to something different.

Introducing “Our Pulse”: Autostraddle’s Queer Latina Essay Series

by Angélica Becerra

I’m proud to be a Latina and sometimes I just want to shout it from the rooftops. My culture, my food, my people, our inside jokes, our parties, our families, our histories — all make me smile so much and brings joy to my life. When it comes to queer Latinxs, my heart just bursts with so much love for my hermanxs. I want to share that love with y’all, so I gathered up some writers to bring you an essay series that I think you’ll enjoy!

But first, here’s some history and context. Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15 to October 15 in the United States. It started off as Hispanic Heritage Week in 1968. The date September 15 was chosen because that’s when five Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua) gained their independence. Mexico and Chile’s independence days are on September 16 and September 18, respectively. Many argue that Hispanic Heritage Month centers on Spanish colonizers when the purpose of the month is to celebrate people with histories in Latin America who became free from Spanish rule.

The word “Hispanic” refers to people of Spanish-speaking origin, which includes Spain and does not include Brazil because they speak Portuguese. “Latino” refers to people of Latin American origin and excludes their European colonizers. Both these terms don’t accurately reflect the racial diversity and complex histories of people with Latin American origins because we have ancestry of indigenous people, European colonizers, African people and others who immigrated to Latin America. Latinxs are so varied and cool and identify in a bunch of different ways because of our different experiences and histories! Now with that in mind, I’m using the word Latinx for our purposes here because the word doesn’t associate with white people and I want to uplift voices that are underrepresented in the United States.

Welcome to Autostraddle’s Latinx Essay Series: Our Pulse

For queer Latinxs, the Orlando shooting shook our community to the very core and left us in mourning and in rage, but it also made us love each other harder and stronger. Through this shared heartbreak, the Pulse shooting quickly became a watershed moment for queer Latinx solidarity and brought us closer. At this moment in time, it seems queer Latinx experiences have been defined by Orlando in the media. I want to push beyond this narrative while still honoring the tragedy. I want the world to know that even though this tragedy hurt us all, we contain multitudes and live brilliant lives beyond this pain. In honor of celebrating Latinxs during Hispanic Heritage Month, Autostraddle curated a collection of essays by lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans Latina and Latinx writers to showcase our experiences, our pulse.

For the next few weeks, look out for essays about interracial dating, love and sex, navigating identity as a transracial adoptee, growing up with tragedy, immigrant parents, organizing LGBT people along the border in South Texas, and more.

The beautiful header image – with Latinx food staples, El Pato and Goya cans, growing flowers arranged in the colors of the LGBTQ flag – was illustrated by queer Chicana artivist Angélica Becerra. You might have seen her illustrations of badass women on Instagram or Tumblr. She paints portraits of fierce women she didn’t grow up hearing about, like Sandra Cisneros, bell hooks and Toni Morrison.

“Most of my portraits begin with research, learning about the activist I’m painting influences which colors I choose. Then, I sketch and paint a watercolor portrait, scan it and add a quote that I feel best represents their vision of social justice. I wholeheartedly believe in my work as a healing salve and self-care practice, as well as a way to preserve a queer activist politics alive.”

I hope you enjoy the series as much as I enjoyed putting it together! Read the series here.