A Love Letter to my Barrio

A Love Letter to my Barrio

BY Lilliana Espinoza

Your roots run deep, so deep, that your beauty came before these borders, before violence and addiction, before anyone tried to rename you and claim you, before anyone divided you, before the destruction—you were indigenous land, you were mother earth in her original form, you were alive, you were sacred, you were breathing medicine. Protected by the indigenous people who loved and took care of you, who listened to you, who cherished you. You belonged to no empires, you belonged to no Kings, you belonged to no government, you are not property. You are memories, you are ceremony, you are water, soil, medicine, and spirit.

Then colonization arrived.

Then you were conquered in 1777 with the arrival of Spanish settlers, then violence came dressed as expansion. Your beautiful land was conquered with disease, forced labor and destruction to indigenous practices. Indigenous people were infected by diseases that they had no way of escaping. What once was sacred land was now broken by invasion of settlers and still you took all the violence on the chin like a sav’.

Then you were conquered again by the Mexican government and later again by the United States in 1848; you were conquered by three empires, three systems of destruction, all trying to possess and take what was never theirs. They changed laws, put up borders, put men in charge of your land, but they cannot erase the truth of what you really were. Beneath their laws and titles you remain indigenous land, beneath all the colonization, your medicine still survived.

By the 19th century, your body blossomed into fields of orchards, you produced peaches, apricots, plums, and cherries. Mother Earth was still providing through you, my beautiful Eastside, even after all the violence you continued to nourish and provide for your people, you continued to feed families, but once again you were conquered—this time you were taken advantage of by massive industrial cannery production. They rose up and fed off your land without honoring you, taking every last seed from you, what you gave freely to feed your people through the Earth was turned into profit through exploitation.

Beginning in the 1920s, Mexicano workers settled into you, many of them arriving to work. These workers were immigrants and laborers. They began buying land and building homes on you. They planted themselves into you with hope, sacrifice and determination to build and provide for their families… But even as they built communities and neighborhoods, You were still neglected and undeveloped. There were no paved streets, no resources, flooding, and mud from the silver creek swallowed your roads. Poverty, crime, abuse, police violence shaped the reality of families just trying to survive on you. The neighborhood that came on you was called Sal Si Puedes–Get Out If You Can—even in its name was a warning. The system had failed You and abandoned you.

And still people stayed because survival is also a form of love, because your medicine gave them hope that one day it will get better.

By the 1940s, You had already been used and abused by colonization for many generations, your feminine energy, your softness, your sacred power had been covered over by patriarchy and Machismo Men. Men who often claim to speak for the people while still producing forms of domination that silenced women, and tried to Erase your sacred feminine energy that centered community healing. Faces of men like Chavez who portrayed themselves as leaders had plastered their faces all through you and into your history and left the women who carried families, pain, memory, labor, and survival unnamed, but my beautiful east side you remember them, you remember these mothers, you remember their daughters, you remember their grandmothers, the workers, the organizers who led the east side together.

By the 1970s machismoness had tightened its grip around your neck, gang violence spread across the east side, separating communities, separating chicanos from unity and breaking apart families already carrying Generational trauma. Many men disappeared into violence, prisons, emotional absence, and drug addiction, leaving their women to hold up the households and care for the children on their own. Many Eastside women had no choice, but to become hard in order to survive. Many of these women had to mirror the same masculine energy around them and joined gangs not because they were lost and weak, but because they were seeking protection, belonging, and community in a system that denied them any safety or resources. What looks like rebellion was actually survival.

By the 1990s, you were conquered again just like the infected disease that took out the indigenous people of this land—drugs infected the east side. Addiction moved fast through families and neighborhoods, like another form of colonization, invading homes, Numbing trauma and continuing the cycle of poverty and abandonment. Once again your women were left carrying the weight on their shoulders, they struggled to pay bills, buy diapers, formula, and put food on the table all while trying to raise children in systems designed to fail them from the very start. There were no resources, no support, and no one was coming to save them and pull them out of this deep dark hole. Their men were consumed by drugs and alcohol, being emotionally and physically absent. Women were overwhelmed by pain and had no choice, but to survive. So they turned to the very thing that was destroying their families just to escape the pain.

And their children witnessed it all.

Their children inherited their mother's wounds, their mother's pain. They inherited their mothers survival skills, their fears, and their grief. This is intergenerational trauma. This is called Susto. A deep wound within the soul carried through memory, DNA and stories. It passes through grandmothers to mothers to their children from barrios to bodies. From the past to present. It is not a weakness. This is what happens when people are conquered again and again and again and again and told, This is Normal. Told, This is your Fault—you're in this position. Told, This is Your fault you're stuck in this Hole. You did this to yourself—now, Work Harder.

But my beautiful east side, your story does Not End in being conquered.

You are still here,

You are still sacred, 

You are still worthy of being healed.

We do not heal by forgetting what happened. We heal by telling the truth. We heal by calling out colonization, machismo men, gang violence, addiction, unjust systems, and the settlers who fed off our people and our land. We heal by remembering that before all the violence. You belonged to indigenous practices, ceremony consciousness and medicine, you are Mother Earth in her sacred form. We heal you by returning to the wisdom that existed before settlers tried to bury you.

“We do not heal by forgetting what happened. We heal by telling the truth. We heal by calling out colonization, machismo men, gang violence, addiction, unjust systems, and the settlers who fed off our people and our land. ”

We return to indigenous consciousness, we return to those practices that honored the land, the body, our ancestors, the women, the children, and the indigenous ways. We must remember that healing is not just personal, it's political. It is reclaiming our language, our storytelling, our prayers, our relationship with Mother Earth. It is restoring the feminine energy that is suppressed. It is protecting women, uplifting mothers, supporting our children and creating spaces where women do not have to become hardened to survive.

East side, you were never broken beyond repair—you were wounded, you were conquered, you were exploited by these men, by the settlers, by these colonizers, but you were never empty—beneath the trauma, beneath the violence, beneath the streets, filled with blood, filled with needles, filled with baggies, your original medicine is still alive.

And I will heal you

I will heal you with the storytelling

I will heal you with remembrance

I will heal you with indigenous ways

I will heal you by rejecting machismoness

I will heal you by breaking cycles of violence and addiction

I will heal you by honoring the women who kept life going when everything around them was falling on them

I will heal you for your children

I will heal you for my children

I will heal you for your ancestors

I will heal you for my ancestors

I will heal you for the generation still to come

My beautiful east side of San Jose you are not just a barrio

You are the living history, you are survival, you are sacred land and it's time to bring you back to life.