Week 1 - Esparza, Gregory (Greg/Gregorio)

Hi everyone, I’m Gregory Esparza a 4^th year History and Chicana/o Studies double major. This is my final quarter! My pronouns are he, him, and his. My hometown is La Habra, California, but I spent a lot of my youth in East L.A. since my mom was an only child and my pops had nine brothers and five sisters; so, I had a million cousins to play with. My interests in the arts and in this class in particular are layered with my genuine interest in knowing more about Chicana art and the artists and the theory applied to the visual works in the texts we will read. These perspectives, I believe will inspire my artistic endeavors in music as a vocalist. More specifically, I intend to gather oral histories with the legendary artists I have the honor to work with and I plan to write about it. I was formerly a vocalist with Cannibal & The Headhunters, and for the past 14 years currently with Thee Midniters, both seminal groups out of East L.A. 1960s era. At the current time I am working on a monograph about Thee Midniters that has been on my mind for a long time and is now underway this Winter 2020 quarter.

            When it comes to identity, at first, I believed I was Mexican American. Growing up in La Habra, there weren’t that many of us, but the ironic thing was, English being my first language, I didn’t even know I connected to Mexican until the 3^rd grade. For all those years I was purely a kid and identity, was simply not in the forefront of my thoughts at 8 years old. I mentioned I had a million cousins, and it happened to be my older cousins from East L.A. that told me I was Chicano. I was like what? What’s that? I didn’t get it until I learned the history about the Chicano movement and the political consciousness that was raised by the community. So, this made me recall the first time I was ever profiled as a thief in my hometown. I was around 12 or 13 years old and with my older brother by one year, and my Italian friend James. We walked through a department store called Bullock’s. It was somewhat of a high-end store and we all had on our blue and white championship little league jackets on as we cut through the store to get to an arcade. As we exited the store the security guard stopped us but only asked my brother and I to open our jackets. He was accusing us of shoplifting, but he never asked my fair complexioned friend James to open his jacket. After learning about racism and biased social institutions and society that have imposed their discrimination upon those of us from the Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x communities, I realized on that particular day, that guard represented society as he profiled me, politicized me, and at that moment I officially became a Chicano.