Thursday, April 16, 1998
MEChA excludes homosexuals, women from conference unity
Concerns
of all members not addressed by poorly organized meeting
By Alex Ortega
I am writing this letter in response to Dennis Lim’s "article"
on MEChA’s national conference, which was held at UCLA on the
weekend of April 10-12. From romanticizing MEChA’s tokenistic title
celebrating "la Mujer" ("the Chicana woman"), to buying MEChA’s
claim of ethnic unity, Lim seemed completely oblivious to
participants’ loud and emphatic criticism of MEChA’s institutional
sexism and homophobia which ran rampant at this conference.
Had Lim interviewed a wider sample of participants instead of
cheerleading for MEChA, he would have found that many progressive
MEChA members from throughout the country were anything but unified
at this conference.
Many Chicana/o feminist participants were enraged by the
reductive approach MEChA took in discussing Chicana women’s
empowerment.
Limiting their attention to "the Chicana woman" in the
conference’s theme as well as some of the workshops and caucuses
reflected MEChA’s ignorance of Chicana feminist principles which
reject the romanticized and monolithic figure represented by this
singular, theoretic "la mujer Chicana."
Had MEChA de UCLA members been awake during their Chicana
Studies classes, they would have known that their "la mujer" term
reduces the diverse experiences and identities of Chicana
women.
Indeed, given our community’s sexist virgin/whore dichotomy,
when Chicanas/os speak of "the woman," we have to ask: What woman
are they talking about? Could it be the asexual model that
traditional culture idealizes as "the" Chicana womanhood
represented by the virgin of Guadelupe? By this construction,
Chicana lesbians would be completely erased and excluded from
MEChA’s "the woman" figure.
Another example of MEChA’s inadequate approach to real
(non-tokenizing) gender equity, which Mr. Lim completely missed,
was MEChA’s failure to find adequate presenters for the "Chicana
Feminism" workshop.
The presenters were found at the last minute – despite the fact
that this conference was supposedly focused on Chicana women’s
empowerment.
The presenters were two self-styled "indigenous women" who drew
a "hierarchy of oppression" diagram as part of their workshop. In
this "diagram," the illustriously ignorant presenters ranked
African-Americans as "less oppressed" than Chicanas/os while, at
the same time, they ranked pedophiles right below transsexuals and
homosexuals as the most oppressed people on the "sexual
orientation" list.
In other words, instead of truly educating the workshop
participants (including impressionable high school students), the
presenters idiotically ranked and minimized the oppression of other
people of color just as they equated the rights of pedophiles with
those of LGBT people.
Indeed, many participants were furious at the racist and
homophobic presenters MEChA de UCLA chose for this and other
workshops.
Despite the eerie absence of "out" LGBT Chicana/o UCLA students,
Lim quoted various conference participants as saying they felt a
tremendous sense of ethnic unity. The participants Lim quoted were
so privileged in their heterosexual identity that they did not even
notice MEChA de UCLA’s glaring exclusion of UCLA LGBT Chicana/o
students from participation.
Instead of including us, UC Student Regent and conference
co-chair Max Espinoza asked a UC Santa Cruz student (using his
statewide contacts?) to present the homophobia workshop and find a
presenter for the lesbian-specific workshop three days before the
conference.
Progressive and out homosexual Chicana/o participants from other
schools noticed the glaring omission of homosexual UCLA Chicanas/os
and LGBT tokenization in general at this conference.
At one point during the conference, one Chicano high school
student became so frustrated with MEChA de UCLA’s homophobia that
he outed himself as homosexual and expressed his decision to reject
UCLA’s admission offer in favor of Yale’s because he felt MEChA de
UCLA would force him to choose between his homosexual and his
Chicano identity.
As if the racism, sexism and homophobia many Chicanas/os have to
face outside our communities were not enough, MEChA de UCLA seems
more than willing to oppress us from within.
Instead of informing and unifying Chicanas/os under a truly
progressive and inclusive banner at their national conference,
MEChA de UCLA failed miserably. At the same time, Dennis Lim failed
the Daily Bruin’s readership in his slanted "reporting" of this
conference.
Way to go Mr. Lim, way to go MEChA de UCLA!