INTERVIEW: CYNTHIA PÉREZ

December 3, 2017

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Before you and Lidia founded La Peña what was the Latinx art community in Austin like?

It was the League of United Chicano Artists that was founded by Amado Peña and Santa Barraza and people who had belonged to the Juarez Lincoln Center. That used to be where the IHOP is, it used to be the Aniac (?) College without walls. It’s right in front of the Rainy Street area, there used to be a church there and in that church they had all kinds of classes and so these guys used to work there and Amado was already teaching and Santa was a university student working on her masters and they founded there also the Concheros by Andreas Segura. So you kind of had this renaissance in Austin and all over Texas and the U.S. in terms of Chicano identity and art. When I came here it was about 1974, then I stayed until ’76 then I went to [?] then I came back and I went to live in Berkeley. But Santa Barraza was really critical and so was Amado Peña. So I started college at the University of Houston and when I was there we got recruited on a program… I went to school with the nuns and they used to do corporal punishment. We all spoke Spanish to begin with and so they had to do shock therapy to get us out of that. Everything was rope learning in the old days. So clearly, by the 3rd grade I became very rebellious, but I learned to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Treasure Island because you had to get up on a chair in front of the class, blah blah blah. This was at Sacred Heart. This particular class was run by a lay teach who used to smoke [?] which is a brand of cigarettes without filters and she had green eyes, she was Irish. Her name was Miss Ryan and she used to have a fur coat with the faces of the minks still on… [digression] We were just kind of terrorized in that classroom. At that time it was easy torture because it was just throwing chalk or the eraser. We used to decorate the Virgen de Guadalupe with cedar during the veneration… [digression]

Anyway we used to sing “My Country tis of Thee, land of liberty” and I never knew what that was about. We used to say los Estados Unidos and go, “Where is that?” We were kind of clueless about nations and continents and stuff like that. Even though we were from the United States we always just considered ourselves Americans. And then in the first grade my teacher was Sister Alberta and I remember being traumatized because I went home and told my mom, “Hey, too many letters in my name.” You sit at the desk and write your name down and I thought, “There are too many letters in my name.” And then you have to assimilate. We were all predominately Spanish speakers and then to break your habit, my teacher was from Texas, she got [?] and rubbed it on my lips and you know how much that burns? And I’m just 7 years old. To make a long story short, Sister Mildred got my and put a clothespin on my tongue and you outstretch your arms like Jesus cause everything is about the cross and the church. Her favorite thing was to call us skinflints and what that means is you’re “niggerly” or a “miser”. We didn’t pay them no mind because we didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. When we got to the third grade they would wash our mouths out with soap. By that time I already decided I hated school and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. The baseball team is really what solidified me, we survived and clung together. When we graduated from high school the Divine Providence raised the price and we hated being with those nuns so I told my mom to save the money and send me to college.

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On the activism she did at the University of Houston:

There was a program called Student Opportunity Services, you go over there and get peer counseling and coaching and stuff like that. I attribute all of this to that program because two things happened. We used to have small conferences because we were trying to survive and one of the ways that helped us was that we had speakers. For example, in the Mexican American Youth Organization we would try to have little forums and it was also the renaissance for the development of women organizations (ELLAS). In Maya and the Raza Unida, they were very patriarchal organizations run by the men and we had to do all the grunt work and they got to do all the deciding and the intellectualizing.

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On ethnic studies and what inspired her thinking:

That was an important experience—leaving home, going to the University of Houston, meeting the other women, being part of that renaissance, being able to complain, being able to talk about things academically, politically, and educationally, because all of the conferences that we had always focused on health, education, and politics. We came out of the nationalist movement, we are who we are because of our identity as Chicanos. Where are we going and how do we secure our good health and place in education so we could start seeing a reflection of ourselves? Which is the use of Chicano studies, etc. We always started our meetings with a showing of this film called “Yo Soy Joaquin”. I can hear the drums already. I started “Yo Soy Joaquin” and then he talked about the salt of the Earth because it was around the time of the farm workers movement. And then the Raza Unida movement and then the student movement and then the energy to create Chicano studies.

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As we left our own enclaves and became a community at the college level, we started meeting women from Corpus Christi and Dallas and then we became aware of other artists. We would put exhibits up and we would have speakers. Like Marta Cortera came from Austin. Her and Yvie Chapa put together an archive because they were collecting material on La Chicana. So any writings, anything that had been done, they were also part of the key Raza Unida women. They went around to different campuses to start chapters.

One of the first books we ever used for our Chicano studies was Y no se lo trago la tierra by Tomas Rivera. And then Ines Hernandez was the first Chicano studies English teacher that we ever took at U of H. At that time in 1973 was when the coup in Chile happened. We were politically involved as students trying to lobby for all these things and against the Vietnam was and then simultaneously this other coup happens in Chile which was unheard of. It stretched our politics internationally.

We had this eclectic view and we then started to take courses. My friend’s buddy was a high school teacher and he taught one of the first barrio classes. His name was Luis Cano, he wound  up forming an alternative school later on called Ama. He explained why they were called barrios and how they were set up originally. He was kind of like a really scary teacher to us because if we didn’t have our shit together he would embarrass us in front of the class.

In Berkley, that’s when I came across La Peña. They would have cultural programs all the time, we always thought, “How do we do this?” If we draw a bridge to the other side and say quit being afraid of us, look at how good my culture is and what other things we could do together because we were a little bit more integrated after college and we were all smoking and drinking and going to the Armadillo listening to Santana for $5. It was a different environment, there was a lot more sharing and partying going on. We had a lot more white friends in our communities and we were flexible about that. People weren’t as aggressive.

There was a lot of machismo then, but this was around the time of the liberation movement and we felt like we had a lot more power to be combative with men. The other thing was that no one wanted to date a machista.