The BSOD compelled me to write.

When I was growing up, I remember my uncles and mother spoke in this slang, I could here only when I was around them and their friends. I could see when the spoke this way they looked powerful and full of possibility. They would pop their chins up, tilt their heads and cock an eyebrow, “Simón”, somebody would say with a nod; which meant more than yes. My uncles would wear a rolled bandana on their brows sometimes; mostly when they were going out to play basketball. They would say the name of our town with a strong accent on the U and pronounce the S clearly. Not like, the other people I knew; who said the whole word so lazily and uninflected, it sounded like they were speaking a foreign language.

They didn’t always sound like that. When we went to the store or when my mom had to speak with Sister Francis, the principle at school, which to my dismay was quite often, she sounded different. She sounded like them. In our home we could be different but when we walked in the world we blended in with them.

The walls of my grandfather's den were covered with a combination of black velvet paintings and scowling revolutionaries and banditos. That place was like a great cathedrale, it was never finished. To this day, many years after his death; it remains a shrine to his procrastination. Its floor still bare, our names etched into the cement still visible, the wood panelling bearing rectangular cut outs for light switches never installed, and pink panther colored insulataion hanging from the rafters where the ceiling panels are no more. The walls still hold the banditos and Emilio Zapata but the black velvet paintings are gone.

My uncles would talk about the Man, and the Pigs, and say things like chingada and cabrón. None of them were fluent, but their speech was spiced with Spanish slang. They didn’t sound like the Brady Bunch. I grew up relating to them and to the Brady Bunch. That isn’t such a comforting thought. I wanted to connect more to what they were but that was in the past, that struggle they grew up with was gone. My struggle would be something else entirely and it wouldn’t come until a decade or more had passed. When it would come I would go through it with such passivity; one might not consider it a struggle at all. On the Brady Bunch, Alice would be cooking up her unseen food and in the kitchen, my grandmother would be making enchiladas, menudo, or chicken mole. The Brady’s were always only something I could watch, but my family, our way of life was something I could taste.

I smile when I think of my uncle David. His face is a reminder of where we come from. He looks like the colossal Olmec head from Tres Zapotes which I first saw at the Mexican National Museum of Antrhopology. I guess if you looked at all of use, unless you have lived in the Americasyou might not be able to pinpoint where we were from, but you probably wouldn't guess we were American at all. Actually, I was was born in California as my parents and their parents were before them. It was my great-grand parents who were born elsewhere and travelled here as immigrants or refugees fleeing a revolution in 1910. They didn’t have far to journey. In fact, they walked part of the way, crossing the border with just one step. Whichever states they may have come from in Mexico and whatever states they may have lived in or passed through for a time in the U.S, they ended up in Los Angeles, California. This is where I lived most of my life.

Through all of the years until mine, my family has been called Mexicans, refugees, immigrants, braceros, wetbacks, beaners, Hispanics, etc. In my parents’ generation, they began calling themselves Chicanos and this is what I call myself. I am a Chicana. Some people of my own generation and those after me may call themselves Latinos, Hispanics, Mexican-American or just Americans. It is a matter of the environment in which one was raised.

I didn’t watch the Brady Bunch for all of the 1970s; it was cancelled in 1974. Although, I may have watched reruns, I also tuned into the other shows of the time; Good Times, All in the Family, Maude, and the Jefferson. I was a kid at this time; I wasn’t learning politics at St. Francis of Rome Elementary school. I was listening to my uncles and mom and I was watching television. I am not saying I understood everything that was going on. I liked riding my bike all over town, reading “White Fang” or "Old Yeller", playing baseball with my friends, and listenting to my family; and somehow in that milieu, my identity was being formed.