LOS ANGELES - October 11, 2008
The Joto Caucus of the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies held a conference on October 10-11, 2008 at California State University Los Angeles.
The conference included music, speakers, presentations, food, and much more. Saturday featured a keynote speech by renowned theorist Cherríe Moraga.
Some quotes: "What is our response as queer people of color to these times? Do we look to the middle to middle-class America to protect our rights and our pocketbooks? To define our family lifestyles and educate our children? Even as the ruling class betrays its own people?
As people of color, especially women and queer folk, we did not grow up believing we were going to get everything we wanted out of this country. We grew up with some notion of a collective, disenfranchised "We" that required as a matter of good conscience and survival a critical, oppositional vantage point in relation to mainstream America. This is what informs our politics to this day, because colored queers are not normative, I'm proud to say. And old as I am, I remain committed to keeping queer queer."
"AIDS. Remember AIDS? It took AIDS to create a radical white queer movement because white men were dying in droves whereas colored queens had already figured out that their lives were in danger at Stonewall some 15 and 500 years earlier. Remember slavery? Remember genocide? There is no critique of the normal without the queer. The beauty of the queer is that he/she requires society to question itself. Its assumptions about desire, about masculinity and femininity, about power. Bitterly, it is also the poverty of people of color and the rape of women that requires this country to question how it defines the "human" in human rights. Of course the majority culture turns away and from the real depth of such inquiries, but the inquiries exist, nagging, nagging, nagging until it one day erupts into revolt. This is my hope. So as we work to eradicate rape and poverty and the murder of the Gwen Araujos, do we accept a strategy for our survival that requires assimilation into a racist, neocolonial, misogynist, and homophobic society? Or are we about root change?"