Sinister Wisdom 97: Out Latina Lesbians

By Sinister Wisdom

It is an enormous pleasure to present Sinister Wisdom 97: Out Latina Lesbians, edited by Nívea Castro with Geny Cabral. Castro and Cabral have assembled an extraordinary collection of writing by Out Latina Lesbians including work by Janis Astor del Valle, Susana Cook, Alina Galliano, Alixa García, Marga Gomez, Cherríe Moraga, Monica Palacios, Bessy Reyna, and many more. Special thanks to the Open Meadows Foundation for a grant to support this issue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Jul 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944981150

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Notes for a Magazine

Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgments

Notes for a Special Issue

Cherríe L. Moraga

Para la Kathy de Colusa

Marga Gomez

Lovebirds (an excerpt)

Geny Cabral

Esa Pateria

Dark Hallways

Diane Solis

Chip on Her Shoulder

Gina Anderson

What If

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

Andanas

Cathy Arellano

Hang Up

Janis Astor Del Valle

The Good Story about My Brother Jeff

Carmen Cruz

Benefits of Being Different

La Butch Gordita

Barbara de Paula Rodrigues da Silva

Yasmin, La Flaca

I Meant It When I Told You Sagittarians Were Trouble

Jasmine Smith-Cruz

A Village That Raised Me

Tamara G. Saliva

Be Miserable

Theresa Valera

Standing Out

Sandra García

Veinte Años de la Parada de Orgullo HLBTTI en Puerto Rico

Deyanira Garcia (Sargenta G)

Mi Amiga es Mi Amante / My Friend is My Lover

Erika Abad

‘A Time

Andreína Garcia

Disfellowshipped

Theresa Godinez

I Am Fond of Your Memory

Cathy Arellano

Juanita Doe: One Night in Richmond

Aixa Ardin & Johanna Emmanuelli-Hertas

Sabor a Mi – Placa 4

Nívea Castro

I Have Ignored Her Slights Before

Alixa Garcia

I Love You Like

Kenia M. Fernandez

The Blue Room

Raquel Gutierrez

Naco Power (La Guerra de los Dos Lados)

Ivette Rivera Morales

Tentación Amarga

La Mar / Vulva

Amárilis Pagán Jiménez

Vulva

Janis Astor del Valle

Nights

The Burning

Osa Hidalgo de la Riva

Away From You

Alixa Garcia

Shadow Boxing

Artist Statement

Carmelita Tropicana

¡Ole!

Susana Cook

The Fury of the Gods

Lauren Espinoza

Anzaldúaism, A Missal

mónica teresa ortiz

Midas & Me

Yoseli Castillo

My Body / Mi Cuerpo

The Straight Lesbian Experiment

Karen Jaime

A Political Statement

Natalia Thompson

Aquí Es Donde Quiero Estar, Junto A Ti: Notes on Mexicana Lesbian/Feminist Resistance

Margarita Pisano

La Civilización De Los Creyentes: Una Civilización Fracasada

Dinapiera Di Donato

Las Arpías De La Calle Cabrini

Andrea Franulic Depix

La Mentirosa

Alina Galliano

116

158

257

Krudas Cubensi (Odaymara Cuesta y Olivia Prendes)

1996

Nancy Lorenza Green

Queer

The Other

Monica Palacios

Gender Fluid on the Rocks

Jessica Ruizquez

Nican Tlacatl (We the People Here)

Maríaelena Garcia

Mami

Antoinette Gonzalez

The Gift of Pain

Amárilis Pagán Jiménez

V (uve)

Dedos

Alicia Anabel Santos

I Was Born (an excerpt)

Sol Rodriguez

Don’t Stop

Alec and Sol Rodriguez

Love Is Ours

ana clarissa rojas durazo

My Love Is Not Perfect

Alma Garcia

My First Love

Zulma Oliveras Vega

First Lover

Bessy Reyna

So That You Will Hear Me

Nívea Castro

tatiana de la tierra: The ¿Cuándo Supiste? Interview

Book Reviews

Contributors

Advertisements

Notes for a Magazine

It is an enormous pleasure to present Sinister Wisdom 97: Out Latina Lesbians , edited by Nívea Castro with Geny Cabral. Castro and Cabral have assembled an extraordinary collection of writing by Out Latina Lesbians including work by Janis Astor del Valle, Susana Cook, Alina Galliano, Alixa García, Marga Gomez, Cherríe Moraga, Monica Palacios, Bessy Reyna, and many more. Special thanks to the Open Meadows Foundation for a grant to support this issue. I hope you will love this issue as much as I do.

Sinister Wisdom has a long tradition of publishing thematic issues that explore and extend various racial-ethnic identity formations. Explorations of racial-ethnic identities began with Sinister Wisdom 22/23: A Gathering of Spirit, edited by Beth Brant, and Sinister Wisdom 29/30: The Tribe of Dina, edited by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz. Both of these issues were later published as paperback books and widely read inside and outside of lesbian-feminist communities. Sinister Wisdom continued exploring these issues in Sinister Wisdom 41: Italian-American Women, Sinister Wisdom 47: Lesbians of Color: Tellin’ It Like It ‘Tis, Sinister Wisdom 55: Exploring Issues of Racial and Sexual Identification, and Sinister Wisdom 74: Latina Lesbians.* The intersections of racial-ethnic identities and sexual orientation continue to be a fertile ground for our sinister wisdoms.

Please join me in thanking all of the donors who supported Sinister Wisdom’s fall 2014 fundraising campaign. The complete list is on the next page. And welcome to the subscribers who joined through our spring subscription drive. Donor and subscriber support for Sinister Wisdom is vital—it keeps Sinister Wisdom publishing quarterly and delivering great issues that celebrate lesbian literature, art, and imagination.

I will formally ask for your support again this fall but always welcome contributions to Sinister Wisdom throughout the year. You can give online at our website, www.SinisterWisdom.org, using PayPal or send a contribution to our post office box in Berkeley, California.

Now enjoy reading Sinister Wisdom 97: Out Latina Lesbians.

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

July 2015

*Back issues of Sinister Wisdom 41, 47, 55, and 74 are all available at www.SinisterWisdom.org/issues.

Correction: In Sinister Wisdom 95 on page 32 in the second sentence of Reeni Goldin’s statement, it should be Cooper Square not Cooper Union. Cooper Union is a college; Cooper Square is a housing and tenant’s rights organization. In Reeni’s words: I feel bad about the error since Cooper Square is a one-of-a-kind community based housing organization.

Sinister Wisdom Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the supporters of the Sinister Wisdom fall fundraising campaign! We raised over $4,500 to support Sinister Wisdom during 2015.

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Error in listing? Name missing? I apologize for any errors. Please bring it to my attention at [e-mail] so that I can correct it immediately.

If you missed the Sinister Wisdom fall fundraising campaign, make a gift online at www.SinisterWisdom.org

Notes for a Special Issue

Cherríe Moraga and Marga Gomez are Out Latina Lesbian artists, educators, and activists; they make their living from performances, teaching, keynote addresses, and writing. Both womyn are well-known and loved for their accomplishments and commitment to our community. Their words are interwoven in the fabric of Sinister Wisdom 97: Out Latina Lesbians .

Just as important are the equally passionate Out Latina Lesbians whose writing, art, and photography are featured in this issue. All of us have something to say about our Latina selves in a world insistent on validating others’ experiences as truth while attempting to appropriate, to hijack our very being and reframe our lives into an aside. As tatiana de la tierra would have said, pa’el carrajo con eso—to hell with that.

In this issue of Sinister Wisdom, Latina Lesbians come together in our various cultural, languages, race and class backgrounds. We are filmmakers, writers, lawyers, doctors, actors, educators, performance, DJ, and spoken word artists, poets, painters, photographers, barbers, librarians, nurses, publishers, critics, architects, political and cultural organizers, activists, martial artists, prisoners, motivational speakers, and producers. We come from kinky hair to pelo muerto, round to almond-shaped eyes, ebony pure to the palest color – representative of the planet’s racial arc. We offer our truths, our stories and experiences, and, of course, our art. As females, out Lesbians, and Latin@s, this is how we see it.

Nívea Castro, JD, Editor

Summer 2015

First, I’d like to thank Julie Enszer and Nívea Castro for this experience. As an emerging writer, it’s an honor to be a part of the legacy that is Sinister Wisdom. Mil gracias.

A good friend once told me The most important person you must come out to is yourself.

Like many Latinas, I was taught that being a pata was a serious transgression. Being a lesbian in our world was more than just stereotypes of short hair and sensible shoes. It was rebellion against every notion of what a woman should be. Coming out and being out is the continuous scouring of homophobic, racist, sexist stories, and the healing infusion of new affirming ones.

What I see in this issue is a restorative salve of poetry and prose, across age, language, and nationality.

In Disfellowshipped, Andreína Garcia reconciles her identity against the pressure of religion.

In A Political Statement, Karen Jaime asserts her mere existence as a political act.

In Gender Fluid on the Rocks, Monica Palacios challenges definitions all together.

This issue is the issue I wish I’d read when I was thirteen. This is what we look like. All shades of brown. Fierce. Introspective. Academic. Irreverent. Sisters, we have painted a beautiful mosaic of faces, of womyn who define ourselves.

Geny Cabral, Co-Editor

Summer 2015

Para la Kathy de Colusa

Cherríe L. Moraga

April 27, 1949 – March 14, 2012

The every

Chicana

every

Mexican

Indian born again

wakes up

one morning

and says

I think

so

I think

I remember

algo así . . .

She, ‘the man’

the ‘everyman’

no man

but everyone

to us

to nobody

us Mexican

Indian

Califas

tribe of ‘Nobodies’

big bodies

growin’ bigger

in nation(ality)

She . . .

I say

what I saw

in that rough shot

memory lane

picture show

running clip after clip

on the cafeteria

wall was a sister

a prima

a tía

my baby

We got pictures sure we got pictures of her

momma

holding babies

on hip

bouncing on thigh

straddled on back

another round

pour me

they keep coming round

Still she be

the most beautiful woman on the planet

always thought this my tribe

of women, the most beautiful

on the planet

Kathy

whom I never met alive and kicking

a look-alike to my tía

Rosie

but hotter in Sacramento summer cutoffs

and tank top

arms the red bark of madrone

My woman she say she see her beauty, too

but different cuz I got the eyes of a man

in a woman’s body

I am the mama holding the baby

I am the lover holding the mama

I am she who shall not be mentioned nor named

Kathy

With her goes my generation

cuz we going out like everybody goes

hers, an ordinary small death

in the grand sweep of pendejadas

drunk and lazy drivers, veering over

to where they don’t belong

it could’ve been me you us

I am us

those cedar bark arms

the furniture

post-colonial baroque

super wide-screen tv and louie el catorce drapes

the high drama action of the Mexican American

soap y sala

I don’t know if we remember shit about who we are

dissed-located in suburbia.

I don’t know why it’s never cool to be just plain Mexican

I don’t know

why Kathy breaks my heart

when I never knew the girl?

why we watch the weight gain and lost

slide across the screen

like a infomercial – ’fore ‘n’ afta

’fore ‘n’ afta

afta ‘n’ befoe

same mama inside

same high-stepping chola-style

partee gal

teenage con su girl gang

en su valle romp

why she go and break my heart like that?

I miss the tequila.

Not the fistfights, but the dancing it brought to your feet.

And the damn good cry.

But this ain’t no party at all

just a silent recall and

the clacker beat of an o-o-ld acorned Califas

these youths

can’t

quite

shake

a stick at

Where are the women’s voices?

Why so serious?

She, ya la fading generation,

de una indígena

bailando en la ronda.

There is no home to go back to now.

They mostly dead, those that remember.

La Kathy, también.

I look at youth, their faces free of lines

recorded in the heart

and I worry we are no more

than nostalgia

the romance of memory

when our lives required so much

change.

Lovebirds (an excerpt)

Marga Gomez

Scene: Bonnie And Clyde’s, a lesbian bar, New York City. 1976

DHALIA

(to woman on her left)

Hi! Capricorn? Libra? Aquarius? Oh Pisces – that was my next guess. Don’t you think it’s weird that we’re at a lesbian bar and they play sexist music. It’s so demeaning. I’ve been working on a paper on the affects of cock rock on the self-esteem of adolescent girls. Then I walk in here and they’re playing Under My Thumb and my ex is dancing to it. Such a paradox.

You probably hear this all the time but you look like Jane Fonda in Klute. Not Jane Fonda in Barbarella because that was just a male fantasy. It’s nice to talk to someone right on, someone who gets it. I’ve been coming to this bar since school started. I’m a Women Studies major. Everyone here is kind of self-loathing. You know what I mean? My name is Dahlia. Thanks! I just changed it to Dahlia. It used to be Barbara but there are so many Barbaras. I just wanted to do something radical now that I’m a lesbian so I named myself and cut off my hair. It used to be really long. Now it’s like I can reach up and feel my mind. What’s your name? Oh. Oh no! I’m so sorry, Barbara. No offense!

(Dahlia is shoved and addresses woman on her right)

Umm . . . . excuse me?

(to woman on her left)

Sorry, Barbara. I feel terrible about this. Barbara is a beautiful name. Would you care for a violet candy or can I buy you a drink?

(Dahlia is shoved and addresses woman on her right)

Excuse me – I don’t think you realize that whatever you’re doing is hitting my arm. So. Ow! What? You’re with her?

(to woman on her left)

She’s with you?

(to woman on her right)

How am I supposed to know when you’re standing by the singles wall?

TURKEY

(in a fighting stance addressing women next to Dahlia)

Yo! What’s the problem here? Why you touching my girlfriend?

(To Dahlia)

Yes, you are my girlfriend.

(back to the couple)

Now look you two, you got a problem with her you gotta go through me. We can take this outside. You want a piece of me? You want a piece of Turkey? Yeah, walk away.

(To Dahlia)

You okay, baby? You shouldn’t be standing by the singles wall. This is where the drama happens. Anyway you’re not single, Barbara. Barbara! Why you acting like you don’t know me. Oh right, you got a new name Dahlia! I smell violets. I love that shit. Gimme a Violet, baby. It’s the least you could do after cutting off all that beautiful long hair. I hope you sold it. (Following Dahlia as she walks away) Woman, you are strange. You said you liked me last week. I thought we had a good time. I bought you potato pancakes. Don’t be like that. I’m nice. I took you out. I’ll take you out now. I’ll buy you a drink. No. No hold up.

(Calls out to Philly)

Yo, Philly! I want a Polaroid with my girlfriend. I don’t care how much it costs.

(to Dahlia)

You are my girlfriend. We made out.

DAHLIA

Yes, we made out. It was the first time I kissed a woman. And I thank you for that. But Turkey, I’m looking for a feminist relationship and you’re hetero-normative. You emulate the dominant culture. When we dance, you always lead, but I don’t want to follow anymore. Why can’t we both lead and find a new way to dance. And then when I invited you to my lesbian-feminist separatist gathering, you refused because of a football game.

TURKEY

Because we’re about to win the women’s football title and I’m team captain! You shoulda been with me at my game. I called