The Bay Area Raised Me to Stand By My Asian Homies
Growing up in a diverse community taught me these lessons on diasporic solidarity
The first apartment I remember living in was a small two-room unit in the South Bay Area. My family — me, my older brother, and our single immigrant dad — lived on the edge of downtown Mountain View, a mixed, middle-class suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula. And though it didn’t mean much to me as a child in the mid-1990s, it forever shaped me.
The whole time, we were the only Mexican family in the apartments; all of our neighbors were Chinese or Vietnamese. Every day, my brother and I would cross the hallways and kick it with our friends in their living rooms while our dad was at work. That’s when we were exposed to everything we could never learn from a school textbook. From food to family dynamics, cultural norms, and holidays, we were privileged to access a different way of living than our own. It may sound cliche, but for two Mexican American boys with hella unsupervised time, this is who we grew up with.
Our best friend was Abau. He was a bit older and cooler than us — naturally, we wanted to be like him. I recall envying the Joe Montana card he kept in his sock drawer, which he occasionally busted out before sneaking it back where his many siblings couldn’t find…
