For anyone new here, I’m Liz. I’m a 31 year old Mexican American vegan. I’m a small business owner in rural northern California. I’m married to Kanan, the only man on this earth I believe I could’ve happily married. Esthetics and Makeup Artistry is my trade, and I’ve been practicing it in some capacity my entire adult life. I work with my sister, and that has proven to be one of my best business decisions. I’ve been vegetarian since I was about sixteen years old, and while animal liberation used to be my only reason for changing my lifestyle- health, environment, and social justice now influence my daily consumer choices as well. I have a journalism degree, but most of my self learning has expanded from my emphasis in Women’s Studies and intersectional feminism. I started this blog in December of 2018 and simply write to discuss topics I find interesting or important. I enjoy eating vegan food, listening to podcasts, lifting weights, doing Pilates, reading, and hanging out with my two Border Collies, Moose and Orca.
I’m on a new journey to use this blog as a way to make the connections between all the social justice movements that influence my life. If the fact that I will be centering myself within some of these difficult or uncomfortable conversations makes you uneasy, I understand that. But this is my blog, and I will continue to write much of it from my perspective. However, I welcome conversation, debate and criticism. I don’t plan to be perfect, but I do plan to use my voice.
I hope the topics I discuss moving forward, and the effort I will make to share important resources, businesses, creators, and community organizations interest you and help us to all make the connections necessary to move us closer to justice.
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“The personal is political” is not something I’ve always understood.
I raised my hand in an Intro to Women’s Studies class. I was eighteen years old and confident in my whiteness. Back then, being constantly called a “Christina Aguilera Mexican” every time someone found out I wasn’t simply white, didn’t bother me. I hid behind blonde hair and blue eyes, however unintentional, because it provides a certain ease in motion. A path of least resistance that I enjoyed, even if at that point I was unsure of exactly how it benefited me. Invisibility leads to denial, denial leads to invisibility. You don’t have to actively exploit your position to benefit from it. Unpacking the relationship I’ve made with my option for browness in a society that values whiteness will take a lifetime.
I argued with my professor. It was unfair that this was the only elective that fit into my schedule between classes more suited for my capability and superior intellect, like Media History or Ethics in Mass Communication. I purposefully chose the front, center seat every day because I was entitled to it. When she moved us into a circle to challenge the hierarchy, I laughed audibly. Nothing she could teach me could change my mind. I had three semesters of a journalism degree under my belt and “facts” were my language. Empirical research. Sources. All the basics. Socially lived theorizing wasn’t real. Respectability and credentials are. You can’t just make something up and expect the rest of us to take you seriously. Write you into history.
Never mind that journalism was quickly transitioning into a 24-hour news cycle in which no one (even the journalist with the best intentions) could verify much of anything. Also, who are you “verifying” the truth from? Who owns your “objectivity?”
Socially. Lived. Theorizing. The idea that all knowledge is socially constructed – any person can theorize about something based on their own experiences. The thought that someone could be excluded from academia and popular discourse, or their experiences marginalized and omitted from history, and therefore, truth did not add up. Everyone had the same access. Everyone could tell their story. If it’s true, someone will tell it for you. That’s the exact job I was training to do. The one responsible for writing the first draft of history – the gatekeeper. Their story must not be verifiable, or maybe it’s just not that interesting.
I thank whatever entity exists out in this expansive universe for that class, but more practically, for my teachers (both in Women’s Studies and Journalism) over the next several years, and their patience. I thank my stubborn insistence to voraciously consume every reading assigned, even though I did so just to refute it. I recognize the comfortable privilege I enjoyed discovering oppression in a classroom, on my own schedule.
For anyone genuinely willing to learn how to temporarily look at your small world through an intersectional feminist lens, even just for a second, you will quickly realize how blind you were before. And how unlearning is a life long process. For me, Angela Davis and bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Betsy Hartmann, Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Roberts, Octavia Butler and Alice Walker became the storytellers and theorizers that shaped my new reality. Just a few of the many guides to lead me whenever the world seems broken, or hopeful, or changing – which is often. And which is always.
I’ve never been someone to dive in half way. So I reached in as far as I could, to that murky and uncomfortable point when nothing seems real at all because we’ve accepted that reality is created and curated for our white comfort. Nothing helps me feel more like myself (even more than a decade later) than being surrounded by words capable of shifting consciousness, powerful enough to change the world.
Too often in life survival takes the place of learning and business takes the place of social justice for those of us that have that option. And while I was busy “building a life” I spent years taking for granted what I had the privilege to discover in a formal setting so early on: the personal is political. Nothing is separate or excluded from the reality that what we think we know at this moment is largely constructed with specific interests in mind. I let myself remove that lens to simplify the amount of work on my table. However, removing the lens is a privilege, and living without it (even just for a little while) is damaging. And to be clear, the knowledge, theory, history and unlearning never left me, but my practice became lazy and less intentional. I stopped seeking out the spaces. The thing about living intersectional feminism and anti-racism is it’s a 24/7 practice. 365. Forever. The alternative, if you are light skinned, is to comfortably do nothing to protect the simplicity of your own life. I quite literally chose pilates, vegan recipes, and The Bachelorette as band aids for my white guilt, recognizing I was afforded my daily silence only at the expense of the lives of others. Complacency disguised as “self-care” or allowance to “enjoy life” simply invisibilizes white supremacy, and maintains it’s power.
So I’m here to discuss that. I’m here to examine and challenge it and move forward intentionally because my position as a business owner, community member, beauty professional, and an anti racist intersectional, plant-based feminist demands it. I don’t think I’ve been asleep. But I definitely haven’t been awake either. I don’t think we’re ever fully awake. I’m grateful to have healed myself enough to continue the journey with a whole new collection of experiences. The privilege and opportunity now lie in discovering my identities where they meet inside the matrix, acknowledging that through fragmentation and separation, I’ve allowed white supremacy to prevail, and have also damaged myself in the process. But to pull from Beverly Tatum’s ideas, I can turn myself around on that moving walkway any time I choose. That is also a privilege – that is again, me working on my own schedule to dismantle the systems that benefit me, while simultaneously benefiting from them.
What I’m realizing now is that the default action I chose in order to remain “professional” or to keep my multiple projects “on-topic” was to separate portions of my identity into different personas. In doing so, I was unintentionally reproducing status-quo power structures. I spent painstaking amounts of time separating, untangling and creating imaginary categories for parts of my life, my interests, and moral frameworks to protect my business identity, and ultimately, white comfort. Ironically, this attempt just made every part of my life more complicated and confusing. The fact that I even believed that a separation of the personal from political was possible, in the name of simplicity, upholds white supremacy by denying its pervasiveness, and the intersectionality of all things.
I am not going to try to make this less complicated – it is extraordinarily confusing and multifaceted, but it is very real. I separated my business from my anti-racist, intersectional feminist ideologies, and I did much of the same thing with my plant based, animal advocacy. Even my book club covered an intentionally distant topic, and my “personal” life was excluded from almost all of it. The part that makes this attempt to delineate these topics from one another, as if they could be separate and therefore less complex, even more complicated and confusing is that in doing so, I weakened myself and analysis of each by intentionally removing them from the matrix, as if they could exist untouched by other power structures. That is not only impossible, but naive – the audacity to believe that separating beauty or food or academia or my “personal” life from politics is possible, is shocking to me now. The illusion of simplicity or the capability of anything to exist with any sort of neutrality is a convenient, whitewashed idea that prevents us from seeing the whole picture and therefore, maintains the status quo. The ability to pull race and work apart, for example, is an option only afforded to white people.
The idea that “professionalism” relies on the denial and failure to explore, and call out the power structures that professional environments exist within also protects and maintains white supremacy. And I protected my business in similar ways. I was always genuine in the moment, taking the time for conversations as they arose, but took care that each one of my carefully curated boxes did not spend much time overlapping.
I’m only now realizing that my attempt to “keep things separate, simple, and professional” was a mistake. That the idea that discussing racism, or patriarchy or speciesim is somehow “unprofessional” is simply an idea perpetuated by dominant culture to maintain itself. I’ve decided it’s not serving me, or my community in any valuable way to continue to deny reality, so I’ve chosen to name the privilege that comes with silence and passivity and pursue the messy search for truth and justice. I’m just me, reflected in my business, and everything I do. I’m on a path to unlearn the lie that separation is possible, so that I can make space for the connections – for myself and others. But selfishly, this is also a way for me to discover pieces of my identity that must be put back together. Since I’ve worked so hard to needlessly separate them.
The Real Life Vegan Wife 