Lydia Otero

This episode features Lydia Otero, a queer Chicane historian, activist, and former electrician from Tucson, Arizona/Los Angeles, California. In this plática, Lydia discusses their role in Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU) and the connected organization, Lesbianas Unidas. They also reflect on their archival efforts which directly connect to the importance of queer community and writing for survival. You can learn more about their work and newest book, L.A. Interchanges: A Brown & Queer Archival Memoir, here. 

To stay connected, visit our website at malflora.org or follow us on Instagram @malfloraco.

Transcript

Meagan Solomon: Welcome to Malflora Podcast, a series of pláticas, or community dialogues, with Latina/Latine lesbians.

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Pláticas are a Latina feminist methodology rooted in the belief that we produce knowledge about our lived experiences through conversation.

Mariana Meriqui Rodrigues: This podcast is published by Malflora Collective, a digital platform dedicated to preserving the lives and legacies of Latina/Latine lesbians. And we are your hosts:

Meagan Solomon: Meagan Solomon 

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Alexandra Nichole Salazar

Mariana Meriqui Rodrigues: Mariana Meriqui Rodrigues 

Meagan Solomon: Welcome back. I'm Meagan, and today Alexandra and I are so excited to be in conversation with queer Chicane historian and activist Lydia Otero, who is the author of two memoirs: In the Shadows of the Freeway: Growing Up Brown and Queer, and LA Interchanges: A Brown and Queer Archival Memoir. They were also active in the LA organization Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos in the eighties and early nineties, and they co-founded a connected organization called Lesbianas Unidas. They're also a former electrician and a professor of history, among so many other important community roles. So welcome to Malflora Podcast, Lydia.

Lydia Otero: Hi y'all. Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you all and just learn, learn more about you. 

Meagan Solomon: We're so excited to have you. To begin, can you share a bit about where you're from, maybe how your upbringing has informed your work and anything else you'd like to expand on from the very brief bio I just offered.

Lydia Otero: Sure. So I know you all are Tejanas and I am from, born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, from people born and raised in Tucson. Their people were born in Tucson, Arizona when Tucson, Arizona was still a part of Sonora, Mexico. So, I don't know, have relatives in Mexico. Like I don't have cousins, like most Chicane folks have cousins or gente in Mexico.

But I don't have that. I just have the experience of being born and raised in a place that was in many ways, like being raised in Mexico. Like we lived a very, uh, rural experience in contrast to the urban experience. Even when I was, and I was born in 1955, I just turned 70, but in 1955 when I was born, I'm not saying that my, my people, my parents were poor, but they were, had limited income and, um my mother worked as a domestic or a maid all her life. And my father, after he came home from World War II, had tuberculosis and, uh, that limited how he could earn an income. So, I mean, we had a, I always, in my growing up, I always say, well, we had a TV, so we weren't poor. Uh, so we had a tv, which was a blessing to me.

But uh, I mean, even in my lifetime, I remember having to use an outhouse. So that's how, how crazy it is. And sometimes I feel like when people talk about being raised in a rancho, like I can kind, I can identify with that because, you know, we had dirt roads, we had neighbors and the whole neighborly experience, you know, that we relied a lot on each other as to survive. And, you know, if somebody had goats, they'd bring us cheese. If somebody had a garden, they'd bring us vegetables and vice versa. So it was very much a communal experience, but I also knew at an early age that I was queer. And, uh, I wasn't comfortable being a girl.

So I really idealized this whole Pinocchio narrative of Pinocchio was able to transform from being a wooden character to actually like all of a sudden Pinocchio's a boy. Right? A living boy. So I was taken by that story. I was also like, I praying because, you know, I internalized some of the, the Catholicism narrative around miracles, which familia and our raza talks a lot about miracles. And so, uh, I thought that that would be an avenue out. And in terms of like solving the problems, all of a sudden, if I'd have been born a boy or I wake up the next morning as a boy, poof, everything would be problem solved. I would fit in and I would be so-called normal.

You know, my mother wouldn't pressure me to be a girl. I wouldn't have to wear dresses. There was a lot of trauma in that, but then there was a lot of joy in my family too.

So I'm very identified with the Sonora desert and the region. I just couldn't be queer there. And, um, I was too young to have agency, and I was too young to assert myself. And I had a queer cousin who was from LA and, uh, very dykey. Uh, they wore men's clothes, so I, she, she was, or they were my hero.

And I'm conflicted now as to what pronouns to use with them because, you know, in that, in that era we didn't have choices regarding pronouns. I struggle with that even when I write, like, what pronouns do I use for my cousin that was born in the 1940s?

But uh, so I did have a role model, but I don't remember any of my cousins and I had a, a, you know, a chingo of cousins. I don't remember any of my cousins saying they were gay. I don't remember any of my tios, I don't, queerness was not around. She was the exception, but at least I had an exception to see and to feel less isolated, less unusual.

And I don't wanna say abnormal 'cause I don't think I ever felt abnormal. I mean, I felt like I didn't belong, but there was a part of me that knew I was different, but it was gonna be okay. And I guess those are survival mechanisms that we all have to reach down and access at times that it's gonna be okay.

But I do think that not being able to express my queerness was one of the reasons that I left for the big city and I left for Los Angeles.

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. It's really interesting to hear the contrast between growing up in Arizona versus Texas. But you know, you say that you end up leaving to the big city. Can you talk about what it was like there being a queer brown person and around what time was this? Was this the eighties? 

Lydia Otero: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, so I moved to Los Angeles at the end of 1978 and disco was already happening, right. And in the book, I talk about how a song that I heard just like changed my life. Like I'm in this theater watching this terrible movie. It's just so anti-feminist.

Uh, but I'm sitting there and this music just overpowers me and this song, and it was like one of those moments in your life that just changes everything. Like, I could not be the same person that, that I was when I entered that theater. So that song was "Don't Leave Me This Way" by Thelma Houston.

And I could just tell from the chords, you know, like the beginning chords, like I was by myself 'cause I think I was going through a big bout of depression. You know, I had been dumped my girlfriend who was like my high school girlfriend, you know, you know how deep, those kinds of things. Right? I like deep, you never forget them.

I still Google them every once in a while saying, I wonder if she's posting that she misses me and regrets breaking up with me. Right. But, you know, uh, I was in a bad place, so when I heard the beginning, like the [humming], it was just so soulful. So that's when I decided to make this change. You've gotta, you've gotta like do something for yourself. Life is gonna get better for you. It can't be this bad because it was pretty bad. It had to be better. So when I moved to Los Angeles in 1978, I found a place for myself and places for myself because Los Angeles was big. It was like, already at that time it has 3 million people.

And Tucson was like around 400,000. So it was a big, big change. But I had gone to, I knew Los Angeles 'cause I had spent the summers there with my mother's sisters, my tias, and I knew that I was going to find happiness, if anything. Um, but I was already inspired by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta. I'm new to LA but I know that I don't wanna organize with white queers. I know that I don't wanna center whiteness in my life. You know, I wanna be around other brown queers like me, so I'm very clear about that.

But, you know, when you're young and you're moving to a new place, that's the way, that's the time when you can make these decisions that are just more exploratory and more risky maybe 'cause I could have gone to the LGBTQ center and I could have gone to a lesbian support group and I could have done all those things. It was LA. But I didn't wanna do those things 'cause I was in LA. Why did I come to LA? I could have gone to lesbian support groups in Tucson or in Arizona. Right. So I wanted LA to be a different experience for me. So I, I lived with my tia for a while. Then I saw an ad for this group called Lesbians of Color.

And that was around 1979. And that's when I started meeting up women of color and getting connected, forming these networks. And so then 1980 hit, right. And Ronald Reagan became the president and it changed everything, right? In terms of the conservative needle, right? The morality compass changed. But still in the eighties, something, something else happened, like on the ground with queers. Like all of a sudden in the eighties, around that time, I started to care about like my clothes and about developing a look, right? It's like in the seventies, I don't remember being so aware of like, uh, you know, I, I wore jeans and t-shirts, jeans and t-shirts. But in the eighties, I became more aware of clothing. Later in the eighties, I'm even going to perm my hair. And now that I see those photographs, I'm a little embarrassed to be honest, but it's like, you know, it's part of the thing. I had big hair, but so did everybody. Everybody had big hair in the eighties.

So as now in my seventies, I could look back and say, what, you know, what a pendejada, or I can say, well, you know, you were young. You were expressing yourself. So I try to be kind with myself because otherwise I don't think I could write two memoirs if I wasn't kind to myself and, and try to cut myself a break.

But the eighties was like more, bigger clubs like the Catch One, these huge places, Circus Disco, and they had started in the early seventies, like mid seventies. So they already had a lot of people when I started going to these clubs and, and vibing with the music, dancing and, um, relishing this experience, 'cause before in Tucson, I only danced with my tios. And when my tio would lead, I hated it. So to be able to freestyle and dance on a big, huge dance floor with chingos of people, it was just such a powerful, uh, feeling. And I know that I'm saying that was powerful, which it was, uh, you know, dancing, the freedom of expression, there were no scripts then. I didn't feel inhibited.

But I also felt that by organizing with women of color, and I felt very empowered by meeting other Chicanas especially, and African Americans who we shared a similar experience. Sharing an experience is, is like shorthand because you didn't have to explain the experience. Uh, it's like a shared experience.

So that was really exciting and empowering to establish these relationships. When I say I went to clubs, I rarely went by myself. I always went with people that had met in Lesbians of Color or in Lesbianas Unidas.

We walked in like a posse, you know, it's like the party had not started until we arrived. And, and people would tell us, oh, thank God you're here because, you know, uh, the party was kind of boring. And then so we, we would make these arrangements. And I know it sounds silly, it sounds nonpolitical, but we'd like, we talked on the phone all the time 'cause we didn't have internet, but we'd, we'd make arrangements.

What time are you going to get there? Okay, well let's meet outside and we would like purposely walk into a club like as a group, or purposely walk into a party as a group. And those kinds of things were fun.

And, uh, uh, I think that we were very protective of our group. We used to have these Latina lesbian retreats. I know you all wish you were part of those retreats right? Out in Big Bear with a bunch of mujeres?

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: We need to have intergenerational ones.

Lydia Otero: Yeah. But, uh, that was for the larger Latina lesbian group, but the core of Lesbianas Unidas who organized that, was pretty consistent. I mean, people would drop in and out, but it was a consistent group of people. But was, it was like holding a big party for everybody, a clean and sober party.

It was just so self validating to just see all these, these people at these events and then knowing that we had pulled it off, that we did that.

But I think the most exciting parts of my experiences in LA as a brown queer organizer was when pre-AIDS certainly, uh, but it was when everybody was just doing it because they were following a passion and because they had a purpose. And I think that that joy is still, I still feel joy now seeing young folks like y'all trying to, to do something different, trying to reach out.

I mean, I, I was reading this book on Mexico and the author's, um, talking about the codices. And she says that she was reading this codices by, and it was after the fall of, of Mexico City in 1519, and she was reading the codices of this woman. And what this woman was trying to say was it wasn't about the journey, it wasn't about the tribe, but she wanted people to know that her gente survived.

So the core of the message was survival. And I think that fits so much. Like what we're trying to do and what we're facing right now is survival. That's our strategy, survival tactics right now. I think seeing y'all, uh, being with y'all in conversation, yeah, it's fun, brings me joy, but it's also part of the larger strategy of survival in these times.

So thank you for doing that. 

Meagan Solomon: Thank you for helping pave the way for us to be doing this today. And I think in our current moment it is especially sacred to have these kinds of reciprocal relationships that are mutually life sustaining. Because we are all ultimately, as you mentioned, trying to survive day by day under this fascist government.

Lydia Otero: Right.

Meagan Solomon: Thank you for offering us such a thorough and beautifully articulated description of your early years in LA and how you got into the work and how you got into the community. You know, you were in your early twenties as you mentioned, and you were searching for community, queer, brown community and you found it. And I love how your own personal story is so embedded with those people who you found community with in those early years. So I would love to hear more about that work that you entered into upon your arrival in LA, especially knowing that you were initially embraced by lesbians of color and you were initially organizing with lesbians of color, women of color, and at the time you talk about this too, in your memoir, LA Interchanges, which I highly recommend our listeners go check out and read.

Um, but you talk about how in those earlier years you did identify as a lesbian. That was the most accessible language at the time. Could you share more about the work that you did with those lesbian organizations as well as GLLU, LU, and other organizational spaces and related initiatives that you worked on during those years?

And, um, if you'd like, also share how, in addition to your active involvement in the community and in activism, you were also working as a tradesperson. And as I mentioned in your bio, you eventually went on to complete your PhD and served as a historian and still do. So I'd love to hear more about your work.

Lydia Otero: Yeah. Um, that's a multilayered question, right? Uh, 'cause on my, my journey to where I am now is, it's very, um, meandering, right? But if I think back now too, and, um, and it, and the first question I think that you asked me was about being a child.

And I mentioned how I was very invested in trying to find my place, but knew that I didn't have a place really. I knew that everything was gonna be okay, that I was gonna be okay. I never hated my body. I always was in awe of what my body could do.

I could run fast. I could do all these things. I was strong. So all of those things. But there was a sense of empowerment that came from that feeling too. But when I was different, and you all know too. So maybe I'll just throw it out there. Like, if you know you're different at a very early age, do you see life differently?

And I think you do. When you know that you're marginal, at least is such a young age, you're trying to figure out like where you fit. As soon as I had conscious thoughts that I knew I was different, like I knew that I had to find a place for myself, but I knew that I had to play a role in that. It wouldn't just come to me. It was like, uh, the closest thing that I come to and in terms of reaching out for a term is like, imagine living in nepantla for 65 years. You have to come up with these ideals and ideas that you're going to be okay and you're gonna make it right?

Now that in itself, making it, right? Like not just for you, for other people, that was really important for me as an activist. It wasn't just like for me to find a place, like every time I would go to the retreats and I'd see all these, um, mujeres come and, you know, some of them would cry because they've never, never imagined that.

I never imagined it either. But, you know, there's a lot of things that happened in my life that I never thought would happen, but they didn't just happen. I think we all manifest it and make it happen.

So I think Lesbianas Unidas was that, and I did feel like very committed, like to go to meetings after work, to take minutes, uh, to work on a newsletter. And that newsletter is similar to what you're doing now. It was like all about building community. And I knew that building community was the answer, not just for me, but for other people like me.

And so I always felt that sense of, maybe it's where I came from. Maybe it was just an important aspect of my being. It was an important aspect of coming from a people who were dismissed and erased in history and making sure that, like my mother made sure that she wasn't erased because she kept all of these great documents.

And then too, when I moved to Los Angeles, I started doing the same thing, keeping a lot of the documents that I would run into, the flyers that I would create. I guess looking back now, it's like I knew as a child living in nepantla, I knew I was important. I had to think that, otherwise I would've not survived.

And I think being a brown queer in Los Angeles and organizing with other brown queers, I think I knew that what we were doing was important. And that's why I saved a lot of things, um, at that time. As you mentioned, Meagan, in the 1980s, we didn't have these words that we have now, this language, like even now we understand intersectionality, right? We understand multiple identities. But I remember sitting around in the eighties with some of the Lesbianas Unidas saying, okay, which do you identify with most? Are you a Chicana or are you a lesbian? We would have this discussion for like hours and then it would come up again. And it was because we didn't have that concept of intersectionality.

We knew because we had shared and lived this experience that they weren't add-on experiences, that they were interwoven. I mean, we understood that at our core. We understood that, but we didn't have the language to talk about intersectionality and multiple identities. So now I have to chuckle and was that wasted time?

And I am like, no, that was processing. But in that too, with the word lesbian, that was the only word that was more formal that we could add to flyers and form groups around lesbians. We, at that time, even forming a group called, uh, "Marimachas Unidas" or something like that would've been too radical, right?

But, um, you know, so I had no choice. I liked "dyke" much better. I always felt shied away or didn't like "butch." Uh, because, you know, as in my professional work, in terms of my construction work, I was masculine leaning. I used tools and I was working out all these inner feelings about being like men, doing what men can do, proving I can do it even better than men. You know, all of these internal feelings I was working out back then.

And so I remember once we had a Halloween party and somebody said, "Hey, can I borrow your tool belt?" And I said, "what for?" "Because I wanna wear as an outfit to Halloween." And I was so offended, you know, it's like, this is not a Halloween outfit. You can't appropriate this. But I think we didn't have the gender language to do that, to express myself in that way. So under this lesbian rubric, I organized and uh, even there was this trans woman and trans, like I know that people say, uh, like in the Unidad Documentary, somebody says, "oh, GLLU is welcoming of everyone, including trans folks." I don't remember that. You know, I don't remember trans folks being on the scene. Um, I left GLLU around '91, '92, and there were men who cross dressed. And there was Connie Norman, a white AIDS activist who was trans and made it a big deal to say "trans," but it wasn't that prominent and that language wasn't used.

But she even came and told me, I remember once, and she was kidding. And she said, " You sure you haven't, like, thought about being trans?" And I remember being terrified, really. I mean, it's like, I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna think about this. I'm a dyke. But it's like those moments in life where you evolve.

I identify now as trans non-binary, but I always stipulate that I want to make sure that people give me the option to change my identity because I want that freedom. I don't wanna be stuck in an identity that I just carry because it means something. And it meant something to me in 1983 and in 1987. And so I'm going to stand by it. I'm not gonna do that. I'm going to identify with something that best describes me. And I'm not saying that the eighties were an oppressive time for people like me who were non-binary and identified as lesbian. I mean, I was very cautious not to talk about it in certain people's company 'cause I would get criticized in a very, uh, scathing way.

But even when I started identifying as non-binary in early 2000s, I lost friends because they felt like I had abandoned the lesbian tribe. Like, how can you not be a lesbian? But I think they felt like I was leaving them behind. They didn't see that I was on a path to try to enhance myself, find something that resonated more strongly with my identity. I think they just saw me as moving beyond them or moving and leaving them, the lesbian tribe behind, which that was not my intention, but, you know, identity is one of those things, especially since we work together and as lesbians.

But I don't know. I wanna retain that option to always keep exploring.

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Absolutely. It's really interesting to hear your experience and then of course, naturally compare it against mine. I grew up with queer parents in the Rio Grande Valley, and they hated the word "dyke." To them, it was a slur, right? 

Lydia Otero: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: So they identified as lesbian or femme or butch, like to them, femme and butch was the safe way to survive, or those were the words that worked.

Lydia Otero: Yeah. 

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Granted, you know, then time passes. My dad comes out as a trans masc, right? And so there's so many layers here. You're telling us a lot of information that I find very interesting and important, just to not only think about identity, but the organizing spaces and who you were with, and also to hear about, you know, the way you were archiving and why, and I do wanna hear more about that, but before you talk about that, can you actually talk a little bit more about what GLLU is? Because for people who are listening who may not know, I think it would be interesting to hear more about what GLLU was is, and a little bit more about that.

Lydia Otero: Sure. So I joined GLLU and GLLU had started earlier, in '81. And it was mostly gay men who formed this group of Latino gay men. And they might not have been the first Latino gay men organization in Los Angeles, but they're the ones that stuck together. And then you had Geneva Fernandez who came from San Francisco who joined the group.

And I urged them to add the "L," right. So then they became Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos. And when I joined in '83, they were already a 501 C3 organization. Like they were delusional. Like they thought they were gonna get donations, but like we were talking about, you have to have these aspirations and think that these things are gonna happen.

We never got a big donation or a big foundation never said, "Hey, GLLU, we're gonna give you all this money." Never happened. But if that ever happened, we were prepared. Um, so they met on Thursdays, the formal meeting once a month. They met on the second Thursday or third Thursday of the month at the Gay and Lesbian Center. The rules were conducted. The meeting was conducted by Robert's Rules of Order. But that was the formal organization of GLLU. And then from GLLU we had these subcommittees and we had the social cultural committee and then Lesbianas Unidas was the subcommittee of GLLU, so it was part of GLLU. So it gave us this structure, but then Lesbianas Unidas really didn't have that structure, although we did appoint chairs and co-chairs and we did take minutes sometimes in our meetings.

We had our autonomy because we didn't have to go through GLLU to get things approved, but we did use their main checking account. I leave in 1991. In my LA Interchanges memoir, I make that clear that I was not in GLLU in 1994 when GLLU disbanded.

Uh, but there will be extreme tension between Lesbianas Unidas and GLLU, the organization, and that's how they'll disband. Uh, there'll be more separatist inclinations on behalf of the lesbians. There was a lot of questions around the money, and that's when Lesbianas Unidas left GLLU and then it took the energy out of GLLU, and then GLLU ended up just fizzling out.

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Thank you for giving that background. At the time, you were part of this queer genealogy, this queer history, this queer Latine genealogy, and not only were you a part of it firsthand, but you were part of the archival efforts.

So you're an icon, right? You have this huge archive that I know you can find some of it online. You can read about it in your amazing books, but as you know, Malflora Collective is also about archiving. So we're very interested in, well, what are your archival efforts? What inspired you? I do think that there's this connection to then you being a historian, right? 

Lydia Otero: Yeah. My LA queer collection at the Los Angeles library downtown, they're working on it, and they're working hard to put it online and make it electronic.

I think what I just said earlier, like, I thought it was important, I think this is important. A lot of times I made the flyers, a lot of times I made the newsletters or worked on, so it was, my labor was invested in it, or a fundraiser that I, um, put together. And because I moved a lot in Los Angeles. I rented a lot and 1980s, 1990s, you could still afford the rents even though sometimes I had to live with roommates.

But uh, it's a sense of knowing what you're doing is important and I don't think we've talked enough about that as queers, as brown queers. Like we got the language of marginalization down, but maybe it was because we were marginalized that we knew what we were doing is important. But that sense of like, this is important.

I mean, you're making a decision, like this document, it's the trash or it's put it in a box and I have to move in two weeks. What am I gonna do? Well, I made the decision that this is important. So that juncture right there is critical. And, um, I think that people that save stuff have to make that decision. I mean, a lot of things were lost, right? And a lot of things that I collected, maybe you could find them somewhere else, but to have 'em in one place is important. But like the book, the cover to my book, LA Interchanges, taken by the photographer Laura Aguilar, who's getting a lot of attention, that was never meant to be, some things like just cosmically work out.

I had put together a collage that was, the cover was gonna be a, um, different photos, like group photos of GLLU and LU and then about three weeks before the publication, that this photo just arrives and I'm like, oh my God, that's it. This is it. And it was like, sometimes you just can't plan these things. Sometimes you don't even know. And sometimes I think you don't even know what, I don't even know what's entirely in my collection. Like sometimes I had to see it through a new lens.

I must say that when I started writing that book in particular, I did start off by putting photographs in front of me and writing about the photographs, the contextualizing, the photographs and the people in the photographs.

And that gave me an advantage, I think, to actually have the photographs. 

Meagan Solomon: Thank you for sharing that with us, and I think it's a really important reminder that, like you did, it's really important for us in this current political moment where again, we have an intensified movement of erasure happening. And censorship happening. Um, the importance of recording and documenting and preserving, right, so that we can develop our own archives, as a way to assert our existence in this larger landscape politically, where there is at every corner attempts to erase our existence.

So it's really special to hear your processes for that. I personally love that photo of you that Laura Aguilar took and that is featured on your memoir.

And I personally loved your hair, but it looks great.

Um, so obviously archiving, personally archiving, professionally archiving, this is a mechanism to sustain our survival because it asserts we exist and we're not leaving. 

Lydia Otero: Right.

Meagan Solomon: We will imprint upon history, no matter the forces that attempt to maintain this, you know, power. 

Lydia Otero: Mm-hmm. 

Meagan Solomon: And I think one of the important features of Malflora Collective is getting to have these intergenerational conversations where we can learn from each other.

And I know you get this question a lot, but I think it's an important one. Given your experience, your insight, one, what advice would you share with current and future generations about survival? You know, you survived the Reagan administration and now you are surviving this administration with us.

So I guess two questions in one. What advice would you give to current and future generations about survival and how are you currently surviving? How are you sustaining yourself in this current moment?

Lydia Otero: Yeah. This moment is unlike any of the ones that I experienced, you know, when, Ronald Reagan, and when my friends were dying of HIV.

It was terrible. You know, it was heartbreaking. There was a point in Los Angeles where they were going to separate everybody that tested positive for HIV. It was terrible. And I remember thinking, well, if wherever they send them, I'm just gonna go, I'm just gonna go and be with them, because I don't wanna live in a world that would do that.

And luckily that didn't happen. But there's parallels to that now, um, that in terms of separating people and tearing them apart, tearing families apart, you know, all of these actions. And I think that's where my advice to young people is. Value community. Find a place where you connect with people because that's going to be critical.

And as I mentioned, right now, is our tactic is just survival. And I know that there are people out there who have more direct activist advice, but survival's so important. Like right now, self-care is important right now. And the sharing with people that are like you and have similar goals. It's just so important to plug yourself in.

I think it's a natural response to unplug and to isolate, but generally that's not gonna help. So I think that staying connected is important. There are big victories, but then there's little victories. And I think that the smaller victories, we gotta acknowledge them and we have to recognize them because most of our victories are going to be incremental and they're not gonna be huge victories.

In terms of my survival, I write. I'm getting better at it with age actually 'cause I never thought I'd be saying, the words would say I write, like I set aside time to write. I mean, even when I was in academia, I had to attend all these meetings and then I got to write in between meetings and in between deadlines for reports that I had to turn into my department.

So I didn't even have time to write because my time was so swallowed up by other responsibilities. So I take that very seriously, like I say, no a lot, um, to folks and I don't go to a lot of places, oh, you wanna go to this jazz? No, I wanna finish this up. And maybe I don't have as much fun as I had, but I really think that I have to, to get to work.

Like I feel like I have to finish this project that I'm working on and then I have to finish the next one. And I feel like writing is a way to do that. I don't think I write books for just readers. I write books for activists. I write books for social justice, and I have to believe that. I don't write books for academia.

I mean, I'm done with that. I write books for people that are gonna see the world differently and try to make it better. I like to feel that, and I think that's important for my motivation.

Maybe as we're speaking right now, maybe it's important for my survival too, to have that purpose that you all read my books and look. I mean, at my 70th birthday party, people came up to me and, and you know, my books made a difference in their lives, and I think that in Mexica culture, right, people were all assigned a role and they lived together in the particular communities.

And I think that I would've been a scribe back then, because I would've had the antepasados telling me history and I would've been writing it. I think there's always been a role for us, whether we take that role and own it. I think it's new still for Chicane folks to take that role on as a writer and there's privilege involved, right?

If you get a contract with a big publishing company and get a lot of money to write, that's a whole different dynamic than just trying to express yourself and just write, because a lot of people wanna write and they want my advice regarding that, and I just have to tell 'em the truth. It's just start writing, start talking into your phone, turn it into a habit, turn into text, you know, your words turn into text and you start working on it.

But yeah, writing, I guess right now is my tool for survival.

Meagan Solomon: That's powerful. And I'm sure our listeners will feel equally inspired by that advice of finding and sustaining community as a tool of survival, sharing our unique perspectives, and processing everything that we're going through through writing.

These are all life sustaining forces. And I also appreciate you saying we should celebrate these tiny victories. You mentioned, you know, change happens incrementally, and it reminded me of something Audre Lorde said, which is that revolution is not a one-time event. We are experiencing revolutions and even something as simple as having this plática feels revolutionary. 

Lydia Otero: Right.

Meagan Solomon: Given everything we've experienced and are currently experiencing. And so that is so special and so sacred. As we conclude here, is there anything else that you wanna share or ask?

Lydia Otero: Yeah. I wanna ask y'all a question. I think because you're so interested in Lesbianas Unidas and, uh, representative to other young women your age that I met when I was in Los Angeles. How do you see what you're doing with Malflora similar to Lesbianas Unidas?

Meagan Solomon: Thank you for that question. Well, first and foremost, I think the work of Lesbianas Unidas is one of the sources of inspiration for this project because it included a group of lesbians as you've articulated so beautifully, sharing this dedication to asserting our shared existence in resistance to ongoing erasure and oppression, and a commitment to building community where it has been difficult to find it.

And having direct impact on our larger communities through activist work and initiatives, and the time period that you were doing that in being as politically repressive as it was, serves I think in many ways as a model for, or at least a launching point, for how we can build on the legacies that you all have created for us.

And, you know, you mentioned how at the time, you identified with lesbian political organizing, even though personally you felt there was something missing in the language. Um, some of the work that we're doing with Malflora Collective, as I mentioned early on in our conversation, is trying to expand the terms of lesbian identity and politics beyond the very rigid and exclusionary formulations of lesbianism that you experienced back in the eighties and nineties where there was very much a strong hold on maintaining what we would call now cis normative understandings of identity.

Despite the history of the term "lesbian" being very tightly tethered to cis womanhood, there have always been trans and gender expansive lesbians whose existence doesn't fit neatly into these very narrow categories, and we honor that.

And while that wasn't always present, maybe back then, this embrace of diversity of gender within this larger category of lesbianism, is something that we are seeking to highlight in our work, in community with other queer identities and trans identities and organizing. So both celebrating the distinct experiences of Latina/Latine lesbians, which are also not a monolith and are very diverse despite that shared signifier of being Latine or lesbian, we are committed to that, and we are also committed to hopefully forging new paths that embrace the diversity of our experiences in our archival practices, in our pláticas on the podcast, in the work we feature in our magazine.

But I think we all find it important to expand the terms of lesbian identity and politics or at least showcase the reality of it already, always being diverse and expansive and making connections to the past, while also building toward a more radical liberated future.

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: Yeah, so, I think it's a great question and while I am interested in Lesbianas Unidas I'm also really interested in you in particular because , you are, you know, a historian and an archivist, and I like that you weren't always an academic. And to me that's who I grew up with and that's who I was surrounded with.

You know, it's queers, brown queers, brown lesbians, who, you know, who didn't leave in these times that they should have left. Right. They were publicly out. I was raised by queer and they identified as lesbians at the time. And I think also still very, now, very much immersed in lesbian culture, publicly out along the border as a family, you know, and this is what drew me then to do the very work I do now, not only with Malflora, but with my, um, other project that is in connection with Malflora is you know, Jotxs y Recuerdos, where I interview and archive queer people from the Rio Grande Valley and other borderlands.

My mom was also preserving. She had all these Polaroids and these pictures and napkins with lipsticks and her lipsticks from that time. I think that to me is really special is that, again, these were my parents. They didn't leave because they couldn't and because they didn't want to.

And they were still around other people, working class people, who were creating change. Um, some in activist spaces and some in not, and I don't think that one is any less important. And so when I came across you and your work, I found that very interesting because I saw that same kind of sentiment and activism and spirit in another area, and y'all didn't know each other, but there's still this intimacy and this connection that I feel very drawn to, and that intimacy and connection is what I hope to continue to carry with my work and with the Malflora Collective and what I search for.

Oftentimes now we have conversations where we're like, we wanna go back to the time where they just were saying out of pocket shit. You know, like Gloria Anzaldúa was saying all this like, out of pocket shit in her writing. I love that, you know? Like, she was drawing vulvas, and I'm like, okay, period. I wanna go back to when we were just doing shit on our own and in a lot of ways that never stopped.

But yes, like, where are the lesbian groups or like Latina lesbian groups? It's not that they're not there, but I would say Malflora is definitely one of the groups that's maybe more present at least for me and who's like really hanging on to, okay, let's not just do important stuff, but like let's dance. Let's just have fun. And I think that's part of it too. 

Lydia Otero: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that, both of you. It's just like knowing the past is so important to now and who we are. So I think that I share that with y'all. Even now and as I identify as a writer/historian, and it's taking, and I think because I've recreated myself so many times, you know, I was able to transform for myself or recreate myself as an electrician to an academic.

And now I wanna be just a solely a writer/historian and leaving more of the academy behind. Because, uh, there's a lot of judgment in that and I hope that you two don't get caught up in the, in that 'cause sometimes, you know, it's very diminishing and you feel less than. And so be careful with that.

So I'm glad that you're grounded in community, both of you, because I think that's critical.

Meagan Solomon: Thank you for saying that. And you know, while Alexandra and I are both in academic spaces, I think from conversations we've had before, we both are in institutions, but not of them, per se. And you know, we are intentional about creating spaces outside of formal institutions to practice this kind of work.

And as Alexandra said, archival practice and documentation and even historicizing, we have learned how to do these practices from family members and kin who have never been part of formal institutions, but still practice these forms of archiving that inspire us. And part of the work we're doing with Malflora Collective is honoring those diverse ways of knowing and sharing and creating knowledge.

And we're excited that we got to have this conversation with you.

Lydia Otero: Thank you for having me. It's been an interesting conversation. It's always interesting to hear what, you know, you, I know you all don't like to be called younger people, everything is relative, but it's like what you younger mujeres are thinking right now. Thank you.

Mariana Meriqui Rodrigues: Thank you for listening to Malflora Podcast. 

Alexandra Nichole Salazar: To stay connected, visit malflora.org or follow us on Instagram @malfloraco. 

Meagan Solomon: Until next time!