Free Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism by Daisy Hernández, Bushra Rehman Page B

there was the expectation that if she sent me off to college, I would come back home. I would become a professional, get a well-paying job, move back to the house and be the other breadwinner. That’s how the immigrant dream played out in her mind.
    After college I returned home ready to launch my independence. During my absence my stepdad had moved back, and the family was living under a new, tacit but unsteady cohesiveness. I knew enough not to meddle. Caught up in the monumentality of adulthood, I saw their marriage for what it was. He had rescued her—a young widow with two young daughters—in exchange for a dutiful wife who would give him the children he had always wanted but had not been prepared to raise. Neither of them had anticipated the power immigration would exert over their lives. Their wedding vows had not included fine-print stipulating what to do about the demands of their immigrant life in New York. I doubt that my mother knew she was teaching me to be a feminist along the way, as she struggled to make sense of her marriage and her family.
    That was my most recent lesson: Feminism is comprised of values that are important to you as a woman, not ideals arrived at by forced consensus to which you should adjust your own life. To me, that is the core failure of (North) American feminism—the alienation of women like my mother who don’t have the leisure to fantasize about a life free of the influence of men, who have the demands of an extended family and the rigors of defining themselves in a place between two real and often contradictory worlds.
    As I entertain adult notions of parenthood and let my imagination float into a distant future—children, husband, who knows?—I know my role as mother/wife/companion will depend on how I choose to define myself in the moving now that will be my present. I also know that our own roles and family itself shift and change depending on many factors. Culture, class, gender, tradition, womanhood, immigrant life, growing up Dominicana in Nueva York—they will all influence and shape my life as I go.

What Happens When Your Hood Is the Last Stop on the White Flight Express?
     
    Taigi Smith
     
     
     
     
     
    When I think of home, I envision a place where memories and wounds run deep like murky rivers, a place where dreams sing like unfinished songs, the soil where we lay our roots and our heads. San Francisco’s Mission District was the place I called home, a close-knit community where poor and working-class folks lived side by side while struggling to obtain a piece of Americana. After two years of living in New York City, I am ready to return home. It is almost Thanksgiving and between trips on the D train and fifteen-hour work days, I barely feel the autumn leaves beneath my feet in Brooklyn. My body shivers from the November chill, while my nose, red from windburn, runs uncontrollably. I find myself wishing for the comforts of home and smile: In a few days I will be in San Francisco, sitting at my mother’s table, full of sweet potatoes, pasta and, if I’m lucky, turkey. At forty-five years old, my mother is still unconventional and has yet to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. She faithfully replaces the turkey with a simpler bird: Cornish hen.
    Will my mother, who like me, spent several years in New York, recognize that at twenty-four years old, I have found myself on the brink of insanity, unsure of where the next year, let alone my entire life, will lead me? Will she be able to see that working at a TV station has made me aggressive, competitive and edgy, or will she be deceived by my nice clothes, make-believe smile and pleasant demeanor? I am heading home, to the streets of the Mission, in search of my comfort zone, Shotwell Street, where the memories are good and the streets familiar.
    In the summer of 1980, I was a tall, skinny, eight-year-old, with big feet and wild braids. My friends and I gathered at our usual spot on Twentieth and Shotwell to