When I look in the mirror, I sometimes wonder whether I am seeing myself or the version of me other people would have found easier to understand.<\/p>\n
I see someone Salvadoran, gay, masculine sometimes, feminine sometimes, creative, ambitious and still unfinished. All of those things belong to me at once. Hispanic Heritage Month asks us to celebrate where we come from, but I keep coming back to another question. Are we celebrating all of ourselves, or only the parts that fit comfortably inside tradition?<\/p>\n
I cannot celebrate my Salvadoran identity while cutting my queerness out of it.<\/p>\n
Growing up, I learned certain expectations about what a man should look like, how a son should behave and what kind of life was considered normal. When you rarely see people like yourself reflected back at you, it becomes easy to confuse unfamiliarity with wrongness. I became afraid to explore parts of myself because the people around me were afraid of those parts too.<\/p>\n
History is more complicated than the version many of us inherit. The peoples of what is now El Salvador included Nahua communities such as the Pipil, along with Maya and Lenca peoples. Scholarship on Mesoamerican societies shows that gender and sexuality did not always fit neatly into the rigid categories later enforced through Spanish colonial rule and Christian morality, which reshaped how Indigenous sexuality was recorded and judged. That does not prove an exact Salvadoran equivalent of Two-Spirit or muxe identities. What I am saying is that the strict heterosexual and gender binary people sometimes defend as timeless tradition is not as timeless as we are taught to believe.<\/p>\n
What changed my life was curiosity.<\/p>\n
I started asking whether the shame I had inherited actually belonged to me. Education gave me language for something I had felt before I knew how to explain it. I was not wrong for being queer. I was a person who had been taught to feel othered.<\/p>\n
Once I stopped treating myself like the problem, I started wondering what else I could become.<\/p>\n
Education became one of the ways I learned to trust myself. I went from being the first person in my family to finish high school and earn a college degree to earning a master\u2019s and beginning doctoral study. I also became a veteran along the way. Each step gave me more evidence that accepting myself was not standing in the way of success.<\/p>\n
None of that required me to become less gay. If anything, accepting myself gave me more room to imagine what I could do and to believe that my queerness could belong in every room I entered.<\/p>\n
That belief became advocacy. I wanted people who felt like outcasts to know that being different did not make them defective. I wanted to become a kind of pastor of love, not of the Bible, but of the basic idea that people deserve dignity before judgment.<\/p>\n
Being gay is 100% Salvadoran.<\/p>\n
Straight people do not own Salvadoran identity simply because heterosexuality has been treated as the default. I know our flag. I know our history. I know the food, the family stories and the sacrifices that brought me here. My queerness does not cancel any of that.<\/p>\n
Queer Salvadorans are not footnotes to Salvadoran history. We are writing part of its history right now.<\/p>\n
Culture changes because people do. Are we really going to stay behind when there was a time we could not even imagine a touchscreen phone? Tradition should help us remember where we came from, not prevent us from becoming more honest about who is already here.<\/p>\n
That is part of why West Chester University has mattered to me. At a previous university in Texas, I spent energy fighting for LGBTQ+ programming and eventually felt isolated when support I thought I had began to disappear. At West Chester, I found a university with a Center for Trans and Queer Advocacy.<\/p>\n
That difference mattered. It showed me what can happen when an institution makes room for you before you have to beg for it. I did not have to spend the same amount of energy proving that queer students deserved room to exist. I could bring the questions I care about into my doctoral work without treating my queerness like an extracurricular activity. I could focus more on growing.<\/p>\n
A younger queer Salvadoran should not have to wait until adulthood to discover that there are many ways to belong. Queer, trans, feminine, masculine, alternative, artistic, Black, Indigenous or anything else, we are not deviations from Latino identity. We are already inside it, and we are helping write what it becomes next.<\/p>\n
This Hispanic Heritage Month, I am celebrating my family and the sacrifices that brought me here.<\/p>\n
I am not celebrating a version of Salvadoran identity that requires me to disappear.<\/p>\n
I am also celebrating the version of myself those sacrifices made possible, even if that version looks different from what anyone expected.<\/p>\n
My queerness does not compete with my Salvadoran identity. It lives inside it.<\/p>\n
I am not an exception to my culture.<\/p>\n
I am part of what it is becoming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I look in the mirror, I sometimes wonder whether I am seeing myself or the version of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7421,2129,123859,7627,123860,69,71,70,123861,12916],"class_list":["post-300830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-el-salvador","tag-hispanic-heritage-month","tag-lenca","tag-maya","tag-nahua","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-pipil","tag-west-chester-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}