Comrades in the Struggle – Part I by Xochitl Alvizo

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, a city where one can still get away with growing up in majority “minority” schools and neighborhoods. And I mostly did. I attended an elementary school that was ninety-eight percent Latinx, with a great majority of them Mexican-American like me. My junior-high and high schools were each about fifty percent Latinx, with the other fifty percent from a diverse range of racial/ethnic backgrounds. While my context was not monocultural, it was definitely not white. 

Once I reached college, however, my context flipped. I attended a private research institution that was over fifty percent white, which is known for admitting students of affluent legacy families. College was the first time I found myself in a predominantly white context and encountered real financial wealth. Before college I had only known financially rich people in TV and movies. I truly hadn’t known that “being rich” was real. And it was also the first time I learned about Protestantism. Catholicism was the only Christianity I knew – though I did know about Jehovah’s Witnesses because they go door-to-door. 

While these experiences were all new to me, of greater impact was the fact that college was the first time I was referred to as a “minority.” Having grown up with a strong Latinx base, where most people shared similar religious and economic backgrounds, I was not prepared for the experience of being engaged with as “other”– marked somehow as not part of the assumed “us.”  

In many small and subtle ways – moments of interactions that left me with a bad taste in my mouth without knowing exactly why (experiences that today we might call microaggressions), it was made known to me that I was not part of the club. I was not an “us.” And in the midst of this, my primarily Protestant friends took me on as a project, seeing me as someone who needed their help, their saving.   

I don’t think they meant to create this dynamic or explicitly thought of me as “other.” As I look back, our engagements with one another across differences of race and religion was shaped by indirect forces, by what was not spoken or explicitly engaged. Which continues to be true today. We learn to see and relate with one another in ways that repeat patterns and habits that are already embedded in our contexts, places, cultures. These patterns of relating are based on categories of “us” and “them” created by intersecting systems of race, gender, economic status. These larger social structures are born out of complex histories and systems of power, hierarchy, and domination created long before any of us arrive at the scene, even as we find ourselves inadvertently perpetuating them. 

bell hooks uses the term ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to refer to these “interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.”¹ Our country’s complex history, which is often buried and covered over with a sanitized ideal version, and the structures and systems it has put in place, was a direct factor in distorting the relationships and interactions my college friends and I could have.  

I didn’t see this then, though. In undergrad, I didn’t understand the complex underlying systems at work impacting our relational dynamics –likely few of us did. All I knew at the time was that something wasn’t right – my friends often made me feel bad – like they didn’t think of me as a peer or equal, as if they somehow knew better than me about most things. 

Mostly, I didn’t feel like a whole person with them. 

I did not comprehend the distortions and dynamics I was experiencing in this new predominantly white, Protestant, wealthy context.  It took years after I graduated from college to understand this more clearly; though a shorter time to begin to recover from the impact it had on my sense of self. I started to notice that difference shortly after college, at my first job, when I started working as an education coordinator with primarily Latino/a kids and families at a family center in downtown Los Angeles.  there, I felt valued and appreciated without distinction. I made sense again. 

There are often clear moments in our lives when we are faced with the opportunity to “see.” To see anew, to see what is beneath the surface, to see more than what we thought was there, or would ever want to be there. Our country’s pernicious employment of race, gender, sexuality, as categories of exclusion used to dehumanize, divide, and exploit continues to come to visibility with unabashed force. That which might have been kept beneath the surface (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) is given oxygen to emerge out loud.  

At the same time, for those who choose, this is an opportunity to dig deeper than we have before into the particular unsavory histories – personal, local, and national -that are at work in our place of being. It can be a call to gain new understanding and convert our collective wisdom and energy into sociopolitical engagements that help us embody a different reality – that help us inch our way toward healing. Even while acknowledging that it can be easier not to see, for something is demanded of us once we do.²

1. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2004), 17.   ↩︎
2. Radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly often said this in reference to seeing the sexism and patriarchalism embedded in the church, stating that it was not prudent to see because “[s]eeing means that everything changes: the old identifications and the old securities are gone.” Something similar can be said when we dig deep into the roots of our country’s violent and racist beginnings, and the current hateful rhetoric against many targeted groups of people. Mary Daly, “The Women’s Movement: An Exodus Community,” in Religious Education, September/October 1972, pp. 327-33, 331. ↩︎