Despite moving around the world and seeing different places, Azucena Saldana has always made her way back home to the San Fernando Valley.
“I grew up in Pacoima. I grew up adjacent to the projects,” said Saldana. “I know what it’s like to grow up in the Valley and the struggles that we face.”
“This is where I want to do my work,” said Saldana.
She now works as an LGBTQ+ community engagement specialist at Village Family Services in North Hollywood, providing trauma-informed services to LGBTQ+ youth, while emphasizing community activism. Saldana is concurrently earning a master’s degree from Pacific Oaks College focused on marriage and family therapy and professional clinical counseling, with a dual specialization in LGBTQIA+ and trauma studies.
Saldana’s existence as a queer transgender woman of color informs her understanding of the community she is helping.
She recalled a saying she thought was beautiful – “God created grapes and not wine so that people could participate in the act of creation.” By the same reasoning, she joked, God created cisgender people and not trans people, so that people could create.
While a cisgender person identifies with the gender they were born into, a trans person identifies as a gender different than that which they were born.
Though some may perceive Saldana’s identity as radical, she pointed out that, historically speaking, it is nothing new.
“One trend that we see across the world prior to colonization, is that so many of these indigenous communities … had third gender, fourth gender ideas and spirits that we have blatantly ignored now,” said Saldana.
Many Indigenous cultures recognize a multitude of gender identities or concepts of gender fluidity, including the idea of Two-Spirit, someone who encompasses both masculine and feminine energy.
For people to now consider these ideas “devious or wrong,” Saldana believes it is “colonization at work” and “oppression at work.”
She added that when people try to escape being victims of colonization, they often internalize it, becoming the oppressors themselves.
“When education is not liberating, it becomes the goal of the oppressed to become the oppressor,” Saldana said, quoting from the late Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire.
Saldana notes that historically, queer people have been organizing and “will always come together to fight for what is right and liberating.”
She noted how Pride is often traced back to the 1969 Stonewall Riots when the queer community fought back against the policing and harassment of queer spaces. And that, two years prior in Los Angeles, the Black Cat demonstrations marked one of the first moments in U.S. history that the LGBTQ+ community publicly organized in protest of the abuse and persecution they were receiving from the state for being queer.
Saldana said the community would need to “feel not just safe, but also affirmed by local law enforcement,” in order to undo the “historical trauma that queer people feel around policing.”
As important as it is to organize, Saldana emphasized that it’s just as important “to take breaks and give ourselves grace” so that we can “come back from something that really hurt us, that takes all the energy out of us,” and continue the fight for liberation.
This is where she believes the healing power of community care comes in.
As part of that communal care work, Saldana is working to open up a gender closet at The Village Family Services to provide resources for queer kids who might not have access to a safe space to “try things on, explore their identity and really grow into who they are.”
Saldana said “there is a lot of resilience” in the community, even in the most marginalized populations – such as unhoused trans kids of color, from impoverished backgrounds, with conservative parents.
Many of the kids who come to The Village Family Services are not only looking to help themselves but often ask Saldana, “How can I get my family to accept me?”
“If we were to operate with the assumption that parents love their kids and want the best thing for them, [then] it’s not about ‘how can we change your mind?’ It’s [about] getting to a place where they’re willing to love their children even more,” said Saldana.
Through having community organizations and spaces where people can meet, discuss and process their fears and traumas, Saldana believes “we can turn these movements of hate into something that at worst we can neutralize, but at best can turn into our allies.”
For more about The Village Family Services visit:
thevillagefs.org
(818) 755-8786
This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.