Family Pride’s Blog

Today is my first blog posting and I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and explain why I decided to join the Family Pride team.

My political consciousness began at a very early age thanks to my parents’ teachings. They were both involved in the Chicano movement of the 1970s, aimed at ending discrimination against people of Mexican descent in the Southwest. I was taught to be proud of who I was, to never abandon my culture and to never forget the struggle that our people have faced and continue to endure. This acknowledgement of persecution has enabled me to take action against injustice in various instances in my life.

My first exposure to LGBT issues came during the 1992 Senate Democratic primary in Texas. I was in the fifth grade. Jose Angel Gutierrez, a leader of La Raza Unida Party, a long-defunct all Chicano political party that my parents were a part of in the seventies, was running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.

I went with my dad to a forum where Jose Angel was going to speak. Gutierrez was seen as being too radical (both within the Mexican-American community and outside of it) and many were unwilling to support him.

Several people in the audience were members of the American GI Forum, a Mexican-American civil rights organization from the previous generation that butted heads with many in the Chicano movement, and they were ready to take him on. The GI Forum is mostly comprised of military veterans that fought against discrimination against Mexicans within the ranks and later in the population in general. They wanted to know where Jose Angel stood on a controversial issue at the time: Clinton’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy.

When confronted, Jose Angel spoke passionately about how he had fought discrimination his whole life and this was no different. An entire group of people was being shut out of an institution, the way Mexicans had been kept out of political office and jobs for so long. He was adamant that you can’t split hairs when it comes to persecution and went further, saying that not being vocal in another group’s struggle makes you guilty of persecuting that group.

The speech really resonated with me and instilled in me a principle that has led me to work on everything from workers’ rights issues and the fight to end violence against women, to immigrants’ rights and now the LGBT movement.

I’m leaps and bounds away from supporting “don’t ask, don’t tell” but it was that exchange that first exposed me to the LGBT struggle. I believe that working together and realizing the parallels within each of our struggles is a necessary component to overcoming the challenges that face each of our communities.

We can, and should, all be allies in one struggle or another.

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