I still did not have the energy or even the desire to try to return to The Movement, but I did know that it was time to reach out to my daughter. She was lucky enough to have made it this far relatively safely, but I knew that we could not count on her luck lasting forever. I decided to see what would happen if instead of dismissing her abilities and knowledge as an activist in her own right, I honored it. I spent time exploring the different borders and boundaries in her life to see how I could help her to cross and merge them before they became too solid or real.
Our immediate physical community was the first space in which I saw potential for movement-making. It turns out that she and the kids in the neighborhood were bored by the limits all the families on the street had imposed on them. Play dates were what made the grown ups feel comfortable, in control. But running over to play four square because there was nothing else to do was what the kids needed. Kids acted as the ultimate border crossers. Efficient and tireless, the kids paid little attention to capitalism, preferring to share toys so there was more. And then I discovered that my daughter was acting as a model on how to negotiate community problems. My daughter and another boy were the oldest kids on the block, and really didn’t care for each other too much. But their choices were to play with the little kids, play with each other, or don’t play at all. Eventually, out of necessity, they talked through problems and came up with solutions to get what they both desired, a break in the continuous monotony of summer. My daughter ignored the quirks of the boy that irked her but didn’t harm her, and in return, the boy agreed to join her games rather than impose his own agenda on her.
We parents eventually were smart enough to follow the kid’s lead. We had to negotiate any dislike or discomfort with fellow neighbors; the kid’s crossing through the boundaries of parental dislike over the bridge of friendship gave us no choice. Potlucks soon seemed easier and even more fun than isolated meals, and parents agreed to watch children while other parents ran errands because they knew they’d get the favor repaid eventually. Without ever calling an official meeting or a rally to decide as much, the community agreed: the kids’ safety was the community priority, and thus the safety of the block, and even the surrounding community, was an integral part of our parenting responsibilities.
And I learned that I didn’t have to be a radical woman of color or a part of *F*eminism or attend a rally to know that every time I looked out the window to double check on the kids, I was participating in a deeply political necessary world-changing act.
But if my daughter’s needs led to the formation of a “community movement,” it was mine that led to the “tia movement.” Tia is Spanish for aunt, but in the context of what I was thinking of for my daughter, a closer translation would be auntie, or sistah. I had grown up so far away from both sides of my family that I never experienced a tia relationship, but as an adult I realized how desperately I had needed such a relationship. Puberty alone had left me deeply scarred and unable to trust any grownup. I had learned to accept abandonment and neglect as a normal part of Chicana youth.
As I played around with the idea of finding tias for my daughter, I realized that although I was acting from a place of love for her, I was also trying to give my younger self what she had needed. I should’ve had tias and sistahs and aunties surrounding me as a girl, helping me to negotiate growing up. The girl I was deserved tenderness and compassion and protection from adults, just like my daughter did. Acknowledging my own needs made asking each of the three women I had chosen to be my daughter’s tias much harder than I thought it would be. I wanted to find the perfect time, the amazing space where we could talk, where I could share my love for them and invite them to share the most precious thing I’d ever created. But the kid who I was was too excited and scared, and wound up blurting the question out in the middle of a restaurant to one woman, emailing another, and asking another while she cut my hair.
But even as the little girl I was took up so much space in my adult life, I soon realized that these women were no longer my friends or even the tias I had so longed for, they were my partners. My life partners. In committing to my daughter, we were making a lifetime commitment to each other. We found ourselves negotiating the same things that life partners do—long distance relationships, hurt feelings, mistakes made, jealousies. An example: one tia agreed to pick up my daughter from school one day while I was at work. I didn’t think twice about the situation until I got the call from the school wondering where I was and when I was going to get my daughter. As I was on the phone with the school, the call waiting buzzed, and it turned out to be the frantic tia almost sobbing into the phone that she was lost and couldn’t figure out where the school was.
Later on, after everybody was picked up and safe at home, we talked about what happened. She shared how she had been unprepared to deal with the traumatic feelings of her youth and remembered being in a similar situation as my daughter: left at school alone, not knowing when or even if her parents would be there to get her. After a lot of talking, we eventually came to the understanding that waiting a little longer than expected for a ride is entirely different than being abandoned. And being abandoned was what both she and I had experienced. My daughter had to wait a little longer to be picked up, and her response was indicative of that. She was bored. Rolled her eyes at the stress both her tia and me were struggling with and asked what was for dinner as she plopped on the couch. She knew somebody would be at the school eventually—she has grown up with the privilege of steady unconditional love surrounding her.
Her tia and I, on the other hand, used the situation to remember and relive the insecurity that being daughters in Latino households created in us. We began to understand exactly how stressful it was to be the perfect Latina oldest daughter who never ever made any mistakes. Through our commitment to each other and to our daughter, we began to see ourselves more clearly and to heal old wounds, just like my husband and I had been doing for the past ten years.
