Elenamary

Oh lord have I missed blogging. And dear lord do I know that this current blog is ugly. I have no idea where my years and years of old blog entries have gone. And once I find them I am not sure I will know how to upload them. I no longer know how to maneuver around wordpress (thought I still did). I have no idea how to get my RSS feed to stay constant, how to get my comment gravatars up and running. To find my old descriptive blogroll or definitions of terms. Nor how to filter the spambots more efficiently.

In a way though it matters very little. I had forgotten about my blogtitlan (a term I believed coined by Cindylu). I had forgotten about the community I had developed. The people who I was worried about and worried about me. The people who got me to grow and self-analyze.

I was first brought to blogtitlan by el Padrino de blogtitlan, Julio Sueco of Yonder Lies It. He left a comment on my blog and it startled the shit out of me. It was back when I blogged for shits and giggles, never thinking people would question me, or get me to think about what I was saying. I’ve come to expect and look forward to people having a real discussion with me and causing me to stop and think. I was also shocked that Julio added me to his blog roll and commented about me right next to Ana Castillo. Damn! I was shocked. An academic Xicano reading my blog?! An academic Xicano who would put my blog right next to Ana Castillo’s blog?! She was someone I read about in class. She was someone who had authority to speak about being Latino, about Xicanoism, about Latino Studies. Why link to me?

Two springs ago I went to the NACCS annual convention. It was there I decided I could be a Xicana (something I still struggle with) and a Xicana authority….because really all Xicanos are an authority on their own experience. I may not write nor do I desire to write for academic journals on the development of the Xicano identity within blogtitlan and the digital racial divide but I can tell my story. I can tell me story and accept it as Xicano fact. And I can try and accept myself as a Xicana, even though sometimes I think “No, I am a USian”, “No, yo soy Mexicana”, “Chicanos are those people that don’t really have a culture”. In the end blogtitlan and my Latino Studies classes taught me that I shouldn’t just accept myself as a Chicana but as a moxie Xicana.

However, that said, I  leave you with this quote from Julio:

Off course it still irritates me to be xicano in the vicinity of my gringo cousins because though I speak english I am not a US citizen. Here in Sweden they a saying about Germans: there is a little Hitler in every German. I can say this about my gringo Xicano cousins: there is a little migra in every US born Xicano.