I'm planning to go to San Antonio for a week to see my girlfriend, spend some time with my friends, party at Fiesta and see my parents (all in that order). I try to cram in a year's worth of catching up in a space of a week, needless to say I am scheduled!
Fiesta, you ask? I know that the festival was orginally a celebration of the oppression and colonialism of brown people. It was to honor the "heroes" of the Alamo and San Jacinto. How does a self-respecting Chicana justify going to a party originally started by white people to honor slave owners and tax cheats? Are we celebrating our own destruction? Our own assimilation? I suppose I can be a relativist (and thus getting off the hook) and say that each person has his/her own answer. I go because it ceased to be about White people and their power a long time ago. Those were hollow victories that the blue-haired ladies of the daughters of the texas republic were celebrating. There may be blonde haired girls on floats with silly titles, but they are anachronisms, a pathetic echo of empty glory. The celebration is about the unstoppable and inevitable merging of cultures, the triumph of polyglots, the blurring of social, genders and sexual lines. That's what I'll be celebrating this week.
