By Myk Estrada,

My grandmother grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1940s, a time when xenophobia induced redlining & segregation of the city’s neighborhoods set the stage for the Watts Riots taking place some 20 years later. My grandmother’s grandmother was technically from Texas, although her parents knew the land as Mexico prior to the Mexican-American War in 1846. My grandmother’s mother & grandmother only spoke Spanish, so she learned English the same way many Mexican-American’s around the time did – in classrooms under the threat of physical punishment for speaking Spanish. At the time, as it is in many instances today, being of Mexican dissent conjured images of hurtful stereotypes; lazy, dirty, stupid, all things my grandmother remembers being called as a child.