©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
Capaz, I write the word in Spanish because all that I understood
as able resided first in the Mexican body of my mother. She
remains for me, even in death, emblematic of the most foundational
set of values, which resided in the phrase, “No te dejes.” Do not
abandon yourself. Although not told to me in Spanish, it was later
I learned that so much of what my mother taught her familia were
translations from a worldview conjured from an invaded and
fractured México, but one which proffered the welded tools for our
survival in Gringolandia.
“No te dejes” didn’t keep me from “experimenting,“ as we
imagined ourselves doing during the liberation movements of the
seventies, but it did tell me when to leave the bar and the bed of a
batterer. It reminded me to step away from the cruelty of gossip
and to learn when to hold my own cruel tongue. It developed in
me a fierce judge of character, one as tough on myself as on others.
And finally, it made it very difficult to lie.
Those values have also served as the singularly most reliable
grounding point in how I raise—with my partner, Linda—her
granddaughter, Camerina, and my son, Rafael. More than a
decade ago, when my son was four years old and Camie, eight, I
came together with Linda drawn to the tale of familia rupture that
had shaped her. From the early loss of her mother, through teen
pregnancy, to the rough red road of raising children as a two-spirit
woman, I recognized in Linda’s aspirations for a restored familia
my own longing for the same. Linda’s values had been garnered
from the palabra y práctica of the Tepehuan Mexican grandmother
who raised her. As mexicanas of the same generation, my mother
and Linda’s grandmother unwittingly provided us with a common
site of ethics upon which to construct our queer familia. With
Linda’s three adult children, grown but not quite gone (some with