My home office looks like a Jenga game of nonfiction books I read about Southern California Latino life this past year — and almost none were duds.
They ranged from a history of gangs in East L.A. to a gorgeous coffee table tome about the cult classic “Blood In Blood Out” to a delightful children’s tale on the late Los Angeles Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela. As I devoured them all, one theme kept popping up: Latinas. As authors. As subjects. As both.
Latinos don’t have enough of a presence in the Southern California literary canon, and that exclusion is even more pronounced for Latinas. That’s why I was excited to see so many voices, new and familiar, dominate the 2024 nonfiction releases, showing that Latinas have played important roles in the Southern California story and deserve far more recognition.
One of those under-recognized voices is Michele Serros, Oxnard’s bard of all trades — poet, essayist, scriptwriter, spoken word artist — who died way too young in 2015 at 48. Her wry observations about growing up fourth-generation Mexican American in the working-class beach town made her a hit on college campuses, got her a spot on the original Lollapalooza tour and won her fans as varied as comedy legend Jonathan Winters and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.
Yet I rarely see Serros mentioned as an essential Southland observer in the same breath as Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. Serros knew that was her fate as a Latina writer in the region’s literary landscape.
“It was always about barrios, borders and bodegas,” she told NPR’s “All Things Considered” in 2006, describing what publishers and readers expected from her. “I wanted to present a different type of life, a life that truly goes on that we don’t always see in the mainstream media.”
Thankfully, Portland State professor Cristina Herrera gives Serros the literary respect she deserves with “Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros’s Writings.” Herrera analyzes Serros’ major works — the collections “Chicana Falsa” and “How to Be a Chicano Role Model” and the young adult novel “Honey Blond Chica.”
The professor effectively argues for Serros’ significance as a Latina intellectual but also as a Southern California chronicler, while mixing in her own Oxnard coming-of-age story, including her “deep sense of shame” that she didn’t know about Serros’ work until graduate school, even though their extended families were friends. Herrera turns the seemingly mundane into the poignantly profound by including photos from Oxnard landmarks in Serros’ life and even fliers for the author’s book parties. It’s a short, invigorating read that will get you to order all of Serros’ books to see if the hype matches reality (it does).
“Chicana writers have a long tradition of exploring their home regions in relation to growing up,” Herrera writes, “particularly in cases where coming-of-age coincides with writing styles that rupture literary conventions” — a perfect analysis of Serros, but just as applicable to “Welcome to Oxnard.”
Another format buster is “Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis,” an anthology by members of the East Los Angeles-based women’s collective, now in its 27th year. The term “artivism” is a portmanteau of “art” and “activism,” and it’s key in explaining how Mujeres de Maiz (“Women of the Corn”) has empowered the Eastside and beyond with the maxim la cultura cura — culture heals.
Photos of artwork and past gatherings, poems and essays offer a stirring testimonio about Mujeres de Maiz’s history. Their radical roots means they’re a bit too prone to academic and leftist jargon, which can grate on less-forgiving eyes. But the joy that members express in their recollections — MacArthur genius winner and Mujeres de Maiz member Martha Gonzalez compares the collective to a beehive whose “pollen and honey … has been shared” far from its home base — makes this anthology an important record of an L.A. arts and activism scene that doesn’t get the widespread attention it deserves.
“We hope our twenty-first century Xicana codex inspires you to begin — or continue — on your transformative and healing path,” the intro to “Mujeres en Maiz” concludes — a challenge all Angelenos should take up.
Mujeres de Maiz members make a point to praise the Latinas of the past who forged a path for the next generation. Some of those local pioneers are examined in “Chicana Liberation: Women and Mexican American Politics in Los Angeles, 1945-1981.” Despite the title, Cal State Dominguez Hills professor Marisela R. Chávez mostly eschews Latina elected officials in favor of mujeres who worked in community groups ranging from the Communist Party to the Mexican American Political Association to the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, co-founded by the late Chicana political powerhouse Gloria Molina.
There are some boldface names in this book — Molina, legendary labor activist Luisa Moreno, former L.A. deputy mayor Grace Montañez Davis — but Chávez focuses on pioneers who barely are mentioned even in Chicano histories. Hope Mendoza Schechter, a former garment worker, co-founded Community Services Organization, which in 1949 helped Ed Roybal become L.A.’s first Latino councilmember in the 20th century. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her to the Peace Corps advisory council, and she became a California Democratic Party stalwart.
“We’re the ones that literally put the campaigns on, and they need us,” the book quotes Mendoza Schechter saying about how male candidates treated women back then. She summed up women’s status in Democratic politics as “drones.”
Things have thankfully changed — mostly — and “Chicana Liberation” works best when it shows how transformational figures served as bridges between Mexican American women across generations and ideologies. I hope Chávez writes a sequel that tracks Latina political leaders from Molina’s first electoral victory in 1983 to today — we need those stories as well.
“Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California” is a wonderful anthology of essays that spans California, from Berkeley to Rancho Santa Fe, Black Panamanians in Los Angeles to farmworkers in Duroville. It’s not just about Latinos, and Latinas aren’t the only authors, but some of the most important contemporary Latina California voices — Myriam Gurba, Carribean Fragoza, my former editor Ruxandra Guidi — are included.
My favorite piece comes from my comadre Melissa Mora Hidalgo, best known for her writings about beer and Morrissey’s Latino fans. She recounts the time an aunt surprised her family by disclosing their Chumash heritage through an email that contained old maps and newspaper clippings of an ancestor’s obituary.
“It was like a DIY version of ‘Finding Your Roots,’” Mora Hidalgo joked.
Her essay takes us to Calvary Cemetery in East L.A., to La Placita in the 1880s and to the San Gabriel Mission for the first Catholic baptism of an Indigenous person. Toward the end, she discloses that she and her sisters had long enjoyed vacationing in Santa Barbara County, for reasons they could never specify. The discovery of her family’s Native American roots now offered an explanation.
“Even though we grew up in the concrete suburbs east of East LA,” Mora Hidalgo writes, “the rolling hills and valley oaks and wine country roads up there feel like home to us because maybe, as Chumash descendants, it once was.”
