I didn’t grow up with Michele Serros. In fact, I had no clue who she was for most of my life. It wasn’t until I was sitting in a Chicano Literature class in grad school when I was assigned to read Chicana Falsa and other stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. To be honest, I just remember being excited at how short it was. I also thought the cover was cool. Well, it only took about one page for me to be hooked. By the time I got to “Attention Shoppers,” I was a convert. Michele Serros was officially one of my favorite writers.
Michele Serros died young. At just 48 years old, she passed away from cancer. Social media was filled with folks eulogizing Serros, detailing what she meant to them, how her writing changed their lives. And then, as these things go, people started forgetting. Of course, not everyone forgot, but time moved on.
But not Cristina Herrera. Having grown up in Oxnard (just like Serros), Herrera recognized the world that Serros wrote about. It wasn’t the far-away land of literature that I encountered in grad school. Nope. Serros’s hometown was Herrera’s.
This is precisely the deep connections that Herrera brings to her latest book, Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros's Writings (2024). Herrera delves into Serros' rich body of work, exploring how race, gender, and class intersect to shape the experiences of Chicana adolescence. Welcome to Oxnard doesn’t just celebrate Serros’ literary contributions but also contextualizes them within broader social and cultural frameworks, all while paying homage to Oxnard.
This is a book that only Herrera could have written. She meticulously examines how Serros’ narratives reflect the challenges and triumphs faced by Chicana youth, providing a nuanced understanding of their lived realities. Through her exploration of place and identity, Herrera highlights how Oxnard serves as both a backdrop and a character in Serros' stories, influencing the trajectories of its young inhabitants.
In this interview, Herrera discusses growing up in Oxnard, the significance of Serros' work, and the process of writing Welcome to Oxnard.
Trevor: For readers who may not know, can you tell us a bit more about Michele Serros?
Cristina: Michele was a poet, essayist, and author of YA novels who really got on the map, as you said, with the publication of Chicana Falsa. She began publishing in the mid to late 1990s and her work was being assigned in college classes even while she was still a student at UCLA, which is unimaginable today. She was a writer on the The George Lopez Show, and she eventually moved to New York before moving to the Bay Area. She also was a Lollapalooza road poet. She surfed. She skateboarded. She was a super cool human being. But despite her fame, she was always just a kid from Oxnard, and that sentiment filters just about everything she wrote.
Trevor: What’s your favorite piece of Serros’ writing? Why?
Cristina: Good question. I would say the poem from Chicana Falsa, “The Best Years of My Life.” It’s a poem that rarely gets discussed whenever scholars and critics talk about Chicana Falsa, so that’s one reason why it’s special. But the main reason I love it is because it’s so damn relatable to what my experience was like in high school. Here’s a poem that refuses to glamourize high school and instead unveils the cliques, the annoying principals, and the whole ridiculous spectacle of those four years. In many ways it’s a mirror to what high school was like for me. It’s a brilliant poem.
Trevor: Where did the idea for this book come from?
Cristina: It was a circuitous process! Originally, I was brainstorming and researching Chicana adolescence in Southern California because I was intrigued by so many of the YA novels I was reading that showed interesting teenagers who navigated their neighborhoods and barrios. The plan was always to include Michele’s two YA texts, Honey Blonde Chica and ¡Scandalosa!sc because I loved how the protagonist, Evie, talked about places like Plaza Park and Vineyard Avenue, places I was familiar with since I also grew up in Oxnard.
I kept asking myself why these Chicana protagonists’ hometowns mattered so much in relation to their growing up. But as I started writing these chapters, particularly the Oxnard focused ones, I noticed that I kept writing about myself, and a lot of it was unconscious. It just came out of me. This had never happened to me before.
Trevor: How does Oxnard play a crucial role in Serros' writing? How does it influence the identities and experiences of the characters she creates?
Cristina: Oxnard is everywhere in her writing, yet few scholars have looked at how much our hometown influenced her as a Chicana writer, and how it was central to much of what she wrote. In her texts, Oxnard is imagined as this sort of weird place with a funny name that isn’t as cool or trendy as Los Angeles or San Francisco. And yet in her poetry, essays, and novels, Oxnard influences how the Chicana characters see themselves, and it’s not always pretty, to be honest. The characters she creates may be from Oxnard, but it’s not always this romantic relationship between the characters and this city, just as it was never a walk in the park for me, either.
I usually tell friends and colleagues who are unfamiliar with Oxnard that it’s not easy growing up there if you’re a Chicana and a nerd, like I was (am! Who am I kidding?), or if you were a Brown skater and surfer, like Michele was. And that’s what I love and appreciate so much about her work, how she inserts outsider Chicanas like us into the Oxnard landscape, and she refuses to distort or erase what it’s like to grow up in a place that doesn’t always love us.
You know, growing up I was teased and called a white girl because of how I looked, how I talked, and because I liked to read, but in her writing, Michele intentionally and critically inserts all these hella cool so-called “white girls” into a Brown city like Oxnard to demand that we see all Chicana identities as legitimate and powerful.
Trevor: As you write in the book, you have a complicated relationship with Oxnard. What did you learn about Oxnard, about yourself, while writing this book?
Cristina: Yeah. My relationship with Oxnard is hella complicated, as I say in the book! To be honest, I’m still coming to terms with my hometown, and I’ve learned to extend myself a lot of grace for feeling what I feel. I used to feel a lot of internalized shame for questioning my relationship to Oxnard, as if there was something wrong with me or as if I was somehow less Chicana for having complex feelings about a city that is Mexican through and through, a city where my abuelos are buried, where I learned my first language, Spanish. But as I learned the awful history of segregation in Oxnard, how it was a city that was deliberately mapped to make it so that my maternal Mexican grandparents could only ever buy a home in the barrio known as La Colonia, I suddenly started feeling more anger than anything else. I was angry that this shameful history was something I didn’t know about.
Trevor: Can you tell us more about the process of researching and writing this book? What challenges did you face?
Cristina: The one thing I didn’t mention yet is that it was a phone call with the brilliant and generous Frederick Luis Aldama that truly changed the course of the book. He read a very rough, I mean very rough draft of an introduction to my book that was going to have some boring AF title like Narratives of Southern California Chicana Adolescence. Terrible. So he called me after he read the introduction, and with so much encouragement, he told me something along the lines of, “This book needs to be about Michele Serros. It needs to be about Oxnard.”
The thing is that all along I knew that something was just off about the project. It’s almost like I needed permission to write about Oxnard, to write about the hurts, and to write about myself. Let’s face it. Academic writing so rarely appreciates writing from the wounds and placing yourself alongside the fictional work you’re studying.
I was also inspired by Domino Perez’s book, Fatherhood in the Borderlands, and I knew that I wanted to do something similar. Our books are different, but we both don’t shy from divulging some painful memories. So honestly, much of the writing involved endless bouts of sobbing, no lie. There were so many days when I had to allow myself to sit at my desk and cry while writing, or other times when I’d write about a particular scene from Michele’s works that would then trigger a memory.
Research also looked like me sending random texts to my mom asking her if she knew what Food Giant was or what was the name of that restaurant on Saviers Road? The process was unlike any other time. I also spent a week in Oxnard in July 2022 where I drove around town with my mom and goddaughter, and my niece took a lot of the pictures you see in the book. That was important to me, that my mom and niece be part of this research and writing journey.
Trevor: What do you hope readers take away from Welcome to Oxnard?
Cristina: I want readers to remember Michele Serros, to know that she loved her city, but it wasn’t always a place she could live in. Sometimes you really do need to leave home to discover it again. I hope that my book will inspire some scholars to consider the personal as a legitimate form of scholarship. Our lived experiences matter.
But more than anything, I want readers from Oxnard to hopefully understand why I wrote this book the way I wrote it. I know it may not be easy for folks from Oxnard to read about why I’ve spent so many years angry and resentful at our hometown. Please don’t take it personally! This is just my experience, my story, as Michele’s stories and experiences were hers.
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