Recently, Twitter wanted to know, “what radicalized you?”

My response to this question requires far too much nuance to fit in a tweet. A person’s politics are influenced by a number of factors, though I agree that for many, it may be easy to point to a single incident, experience, or aspect of their identity.

For me, the interrogative in this question is actually, “who.”
And my response to this question is, “my mom.”

I was raised by my single mother, Mirna, a first-generation Chicana born in East L.A., in the early 70s. She was the third daughter of two migrants from Durango, a self-taught seamstress and a mechanic who made their way to San Jose, CA when my mom was 6, after my grandfather found a welding job at a tomato cannery.

My mom had her first child, my brother, when she was 17. I was born a short while later, when she was 19. By the time I turned 5, she was a 24-year-old single mother sharing a one-bedroom house with her two children, working full time and taking a couple of community college classes.

One of those classes was Chicano Studies. I remember that around that time, even though we never went to Taco Bell before then, she insisted that we must never go to Taco Bell, because the company from which they buy their tomatoes pays the people who pick the tomatoes just 10 cents an hour.

My mom spent all her life developing a liberatory consciousness, and by the time I became conscious of my surroundings, she was openly sharing the ideas and beliefs that she had formed. She taught me to love all people, and to question authority figures. She played Bob Marley when we cleaned on Saturday mornings, and talked to my brother and I about the lyrics. My mom shares her birthday with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She always made an effort to spend the Mondays we had off in honor of him attending events where we would learn about racial justice, civil rights, and the issues that Dr. King advocated for that communities of color continued to face, decades later.

My mom showed me what it was to be antiracist before that term was used much outside of university classrooms. In late 2002 we moved to Lodi, CA, a small city south of Sacramento. I remember her saying, early on in our residence there, that there had been a cross burning on the lawn of the high school that I would go on to attend, just a few years before, in 1998.

Shortly after we moved to Lodi, my mom gave birth to my baby sister, Azjah. My life changed the day she was born; I understood what it must be like to be a mother, to look at another being and know that, no matter what, you would do anything you could to ensure their safety and happiness. Azjah’s father is Black, and as she grew up I witnessed her experience, saw how it was different from mine. In many of my classrooms, I was one of few Latinx students. When Azjah started kindergarten, she was one of less than five Black students in the entire school. For the first 8 years of Azjah’s life, until I moved out to go to college, I watched my mom do her best to fight against the racism that Azjah was subjected to on an almost daily basis.

At one point, my mom became very upset about a sticker that had appeared on the “Welcome to Lodi” sign on the south side of town, which sat in the median of an intersection that separated cherry orchards and strawberry fields from homes and businesses. For weeks she would remark on it, wonder what it was, say that she didn’t like the look of it. It was a small, round sticker, maybe 2 or 3 inches across. One day, we pulled up to a red light at that intersection, in the lane next to the median. All of a sudden, my mom put the car in park, flung her seatbelt off, threw the door open, and leapt out of the car. I sat there in the front seat, looked back at Azjah in her car seat, and then looked at the light, panicked that it would turn green, entirely confused as to why my mom had just sprung out of the car. And then she was back, throwing the dirty and faded sticker on the dashboard, panting and saying, “I knew it…I knew it!”
As she put her seatbelt back on, put the car back in drive, and began to drive forward, I looked at the sticker. It was an image of cross hairs, with the word “WHITE” printed in block letters, curved across the top, and the word “POWER” printed in the same style across the bottom.

When I was 10, the man who would become my mom’s second husband moved in with us. He was from the Yucatan peninsula, had migrated to the U.S. a few years before and followed an aunt and a couple of cousins to the small city, and he was undocumented.

There is plenty of demand for cheap labor in Lodi, which sits at the northernmost tip of California’s Central Valley, and is surrounded by vineyards, orchards, fields, and dairies for at least several miles in almost every direction. This was in the spring of 2004, around a year into the terror of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The new agency was a frequent topic of conversation amongst my mom’s partner and his family, amongst my grandma and the men who rented out parts of her home and who helped her with her business. It was clear to me that it was George Bush and his Department of Homeland Security that were the cause of our community’s unrest. The 2004 election was the first in which I wished I could vote. I knew nothing about John Kerry and the Democrats except that they were the foil to Bush, whose senseless response to 9/11 was causing so much fear and trauma for my community, for my family. On the night of the election I stayed up late, after everyone else had gone to bed, watching the election results come in, crossing my fingers and hoping that somehow, Kerry would win.

Within the next several years, immigration checkpoints were often seen around Lodi, which is hundreds of miles away from the nearest border. My mom worked at the local newspaper for a time, where she started as the receptionist. She was the only person in the office who spoke Spanish, and when a young reporter was assigned to a story about a woman, a migrant farm worker, who was killed by a machine while harvesting grapes, my mom was asked to assist as a translator. I remember my mom distraught after work, thinking of the woman, her children who were now without a mother, horrified by the details she was forced to learn as she accompanied the reporter, angry at the farmers who put human beings on top of equipment that is not built to have human beings on top of it, disgusted by the boxed wine on store shelves, because that’s where that particular farmer’s grapes ended up.
After that, my mom began to get involved in local organizing efforts advocating for farm workers’ rights. She took us to protest marches in Sacramento and Stockton, where we learned the chants born of the farm workers’ movement. She eventually started working for an organization that served Spanish-speaking families as a social worker, where her deep belief in the need to protect and care for marginalized communities was only strengthened. In 2010, when S.B. 1070 was passed in Arizona, my mom made me skip school to march in the streets to protest the racist and discriminatory “show me your papers” law.

By the time I left my mom’s house, on my way to Arizona State University to study journalism, I was full of beliefs and ideas that are considered radical in the white supremacist patriarchal capitalist society in which we live. Ideas such as: human beings cannot be illegal; healthcare, food, and housing should be human rights; Black lives matter; LGBTQ+ rights are human rights; a woman has the right to choose what she does with her body; we all have a right to not live in a police state. While in college and shortly after graduating, I developed more of these radical beliefs, like: equal access to a free and open internet, clean water, and a high quality education should also be human rights; protecting our privacy in the digital space is essential to protecting our freedom of thought; climate change is real and we must act to slow it down.

To be honest, I do not consider these ideas to be radical. I understand that these beliefs sit on the “far left” of the spectrum of American politics, but I also understand that American politics was constructed to center white, wealthy, land-stealing, cis-gendered men. And so my beliefs are considered radical because I believe that we should live in a world that centers humanity, collective good, and living in harmony with the environment.

For that, I thank my mom.