Amicas Latinas Interview
Marixsa Alicea Amigas
Latinas Lesbianas/Bisexuals is an education, support and discussion
group that provides a safe space and opportunities for lesbian, bisexual
and questioning women of Latina heritage who live in the Chicago area
to gather, celebrate and explore their identity and potential as mothers,
daughters, partners, sisters, aunts, comadres, and friends. The membership
consists of about 120 women. The diversity of the membership spans the
range from thirdgeneration, monolingual English speakers to recently-arrived,
monolingual Spanish speaking immigrant women. Recently, I spoke to Evette
Cardona, one of the founding members of Amigas, about the origins and
work of this group. Here are excerpts of our conversation.
Marixsa: Evette, could you tell me a little
bit about how Amigas started?
EVETTE: Amigas was born really as a result
of my own coming out process. When I eventually came out, I guess, to
myself and to the rest of the community, I quickly got involved in organizing
because part of my personal task was to find other Latina Lesbian. And
so in that process through a very good friend, we started an organization
called Women of All Colors and Cultures Together (WACC). That started
in May of 1994 and it was a very multicultural group. It was an attempt
to see if we could kind of create a space where women of all colors and
cultures could come together. It was a Lesbian organization and there
were four organizers, an Anglo woman, myself, a Chinese woman from mainland
China, and an African American woman, and my task was to find other Latina
women. A year after starting Women of All Colors and Cultures Together,
I finally met other Latin women-especially Juanita and a couple other
women-and we launched an organization for Latina lesbians. It was July
15th, 1995. We followed the (WACC) model where we would start to meet
in different women's homes throughout the City and do a potluck. We started
to talk about topics because it was a smaller group. The WACC brunches
had grown to 70-80 women a month, and you just couldn't really have a
discussion. We had 10, 15, maybe 50, so we could still talk about familia,
identity, and what it means to be a Latina and lesbian and bisexual.
Five years later, we are still doing these brunches. We also do some
workshops now that are a little bit more intense around relationships,
legal issues or health issues. We do family activities because it's very
important that a lot of the women who are mothers or who are aunts raising
their nieces and nephews have a space to bring their children so that
it normalizes it for them-for the moms, and the aunts, the Amigas, as
well as normalizes for the children. This is important because a lot of
women are dealing with custody issues-very intense custody battles-it's
really important to let children know we're just as boring as everybody
else. We provide these opportunities to let them see that there are other
children that live in Lesbian households like my mom's or my aunt's, and
that's okay.
We also do social activities because it's very important in our community
and any other Les/bi/gay/trans communities to create social spaces where
people can get together and just be who they are and celebrate who they
are. We're getting to the point where we need to start raising more money
for what we are doing. Our mailing list and the things we want to do is
growing. We want to advertise some of our events and that takes money
and passing the hat isn't really cutting it anymore. So we are in the
process of trying to get our 501C3 status and become a full fledged non-for-profit
organization. I think Juanita and I used to always talk about how we could
lay the torch down at any time and we would have been happy and pleased
with the work we had done for the community. That's not good enough anymore.
I don't want to lay it down. We are clearly filling a gap in the community
that the more mainstream gay and lesbian organizations aren't able to
respond to because of language and culture, and that the Latino-serving
organizations aren't able, ready, or maybe willing to respond to because
of the sexuality issues.
Marixsa: Could you say more about why
these organizations aren't or can't fulfill the needs of Latina lesbians,
and Bisexuals?
EVETTE: It's always been an issue, probably,
in the gay community because of diversity issues. Certainly the sexual
identity issue and the challenges we face from society because of our
sexual identity links us together, but to be gay, white male in society
versus Latina, lesbian, single mom, you know, it's all these different
layers. For the white gay community, a lot of us feel that there's a dominant
culture that they can tap into even if they're ostracized from their own
family. When you're Latina, when you're African American and you're ostracized
from your family, you can't really tap into your culture either, because
of cultural taboos in the African American and in the Latino community
around gays and lesbians. So there's the gap and we're seeing it. In the
last year, year and a half, we're seeing an increase in Spanishspeaking
women, Spanish language dominant or monolingual Spanish. A lot of immigrant
women that are here three months or three years, but that the language
that they're comfortable with is Spanish. They think in Spanish, they
dream in Spanish, they love in Spanish. And a lot of the mainstream gay
organizations don't even have bilingual staff, let alone bicultural, and
so they refer people to us. I'm talking about millions of dollars in their
budget, and they refer people to our little group that as of right now
barely has a five-thousand dollar budget.
We recognize that we're not clinicians, and that we're not mental health
providers, but we're certainly providing more than anybody else including
the Latino-serving organizations that have been around for decades. They
are not serving gays and lesbians. They either don't know it, don't realize
it, don't affirm it, or don't want to acknowledge it. So, if a Latina
women goes for counseling for any other issue they're able to deal with
it, but if a woman discloses that she's also Lesbian or she's dealing
with sexual identity issues, then it's kind of like, "Ooo, well,
we're not sure how to handle that, so why don't you call this group Amigas
Latinas," and once again, this poor woman gets caught in this vicious
cycle of getting passed around. We're just a group of very impassioned
volunteers. You know, we all have day jobs and yet our monthly brunches
have created safe intimate spaces for women to just be with their own.
Some of them come once and then they don't come back for a year or so.
Then they come again and we're still there, and that's important. Others
come very regularly.We've probably encountered about 200 women which,
on the one hand, isn't a lot, but on the other hand, it is. We probably
mail fliers to about 125 women monthly. There's probably a core group
of about 40 or 50. That's not too bad, so that's why we're really seriously
looking at where we're going with this and how to leverage and advocate
other social service groups to step up to the plate and recognize that
they have to deal with these Latina lesbians whether they speak English
or not.
Marixsa: How do you think you might do
that? What kind of things and organizations will you be turning to?
EVETTE: One of the things we have found
that I think people will agree with on the committee is that there's a
need for mental health counseling, whether it's intensive one on one counseling,
peer counseling, or counseling around specific topics such as domestic
violence, sexual assault, or identity issues.
So, if there aren't a lot of Latina lesbian therapists out there- there's
only a few that we know of-then we need to identify Spanish-speaking providers
and educate them about Lesbian issues and where those two identities merge-the
Latina and the lesbian or the bisexual or the questioning woman who may
just be thinking about it. I want to get five to ten therapists that we
can refer people to because we get together, we have these intense discussions
where a lot of things might get dredged up and where does this woman go?
Until the next month when we get together, she may not have anywhere else
to go. At times the following month we may be discussing a totally different
topic or if it's summer time and in place of a discussion, we do a social
activity, then she may not have anywhere to go with her stuff for a couple
of months. We need to identify counselors who can work with these women,
and some people would say that Latinos really don't do that sort of mental
health thing, that they don't want to put their business out there, we're
finding that we've really helped act as a bridge for them. You know, they
gain our trust and understanding and come to know there's somebody I can
talk to one-on-one. Our brunches are now pulling in like 25, 30, 35 women
and, again, especially if you're coming new to the group, there's no real
chance for you to talk. You can talk about the particular topic, maybe
how it relates to you, but depending where you're at with your process,
it's not like a small support group. So for women that really need more
one-on-one time to discuss their issues, we're putting together an awareness
training workshop for May where we're trying to identify peer counselors,
therapists at the Latino-serving organizations and anyone else that's
got a counseling department to educate them about issues facing Latina
lesbians. This will also give us the opportunity to find out if maybe
they are working effectively with Latina lesbians and we just don't know
about it, so we also need to find out for ourselves.
We also want the Horizons and Howard Browns-the mainstream gay and lesbian
groups-to also provide counselors for these women that don't speak English.
The Latina cultural piece is also very important for them to understand,
whether it's issues of how folk medicine comes into play, or familia which
in the white-dominant culture isn't really the same. We need to educate
both groups-the Latino serving organizations and the mainstream gay and
lesbian organizations because Latina lesbian bisexual women cannot separate
these identities, but they're often asked to. When you go to a gay event
you might be one of a handful of even three or four Latinos and you go
to the Latino event and it's not like everybody's walking around wearing
their rainbow flag. I mean, they may be gay, but they may not be out.
Nobody may know and so do I approach this person? We often get kind of
caught where we don't belong. There's a piece of us that doesn't belong
depending on the circles we're in. We walk into an Amigas event it's like-wow-
you've come home, which is great. So, the other thing that we've done
to address that is to start a Spanishspeaking support group. We really
believe that we're the first Spanish-speaking support group for Latina
lesbians in Chicago. That's been real important because, again, these
women really can't go anywhere else. They may go to a Latino-serving organization
to speak the language, but in terms of issues of sexuality and how they
impact their lives, that's not happening. Why isn't it happening is another
important question. All the gay organizations are just dying to have Spanish-speaking
staff. Yet, if you're a Spanish-speaking licensed therapist or counselor,
you sort of have your pick of where you're going to work. You know, sometimes
. . . why would you go work at a gay organization to have to deal with
that stigma of working in the gay community? Once you do that, once you
say you work at the Lesbian Community Cancer Project or Horizon Services
for Gay and Lesbian People, that might bring up a lot more questions than
you want to handle, so you go elsewhere. So, we need to get Latino counselors
to work at these agencies. With Latino-serving organizations, you're dealing
with a lot of homophobia, potential institutional homophobia in the sense
of nothing done to promote awareness of sexual identity issues or to be
inclusive.
Maybe they don't have sexual orientation in their employment discrimination
policy. I mean, that's a big deal. That says a lot if you do. Maybe one
day . . . you know, a lot of diversity training that happens now, totally
disregards sexuality. You deal with race, you deal with class, you know,
ableism, ageism, but nobody's touching the final frontier which is sexual
orientation. We're going to try to do some training with Latino serving
organizations. I want to put the rainbow flag right up there with the
Mexican flag and Puerto Rican flag in the window so that people know that
this is a welcoming place. Management in these Latino serving organizations
may be cool with it, but it doesn't mean the individual provider, the
counselor is. That's a whole other ethical thing that, as a provider,
as a social worker, ethically you have to help people and . . . but some
people aren't there yet, so it's a process-an educating process-that we've
undergone now that we want to do because nobody else is doing it.
Marixsa: So Amigas as an organization
is starting to do that work?
EVETTE: It's a plan for me. You know,
we've always thought we're not the experts. Again, we're volunteers that
have responded to a need, and yet nobody else is doing it. So we are experts.
We get called as to how do you work with these women . . . and it reminds
me of probably 30-40 years ago they were saying the same thing about Latinos.
How do we work with Latinos? We can't understand them. It's a whole different
culture and the way I think about it is if I'm trained as a social worker
and I'm there when the person's there, depending whether they're male,
female, white, black, whatever, I have to be able to listen, and then
I have to educate myself if there's something I need to know, and that's
what we want people to do.
Mother of All
Respecting And Protecting All Creation
That Lives On The Face of The Earth,
We Rediscover The Manifold in The One
And The One in The Manifold
Madre De Todo
Respetando y Protejiendo Toda Creación
Que Vive Sobre La Faz De La Tierra,
Redescubrimos La Multitud En Uno Mismo
Y Ese Uno En La Multitud
Angelika Bauer
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