March 21, 2023 • 25 mins
Carribean Fragoza is a writer, artist and co-founder of the South El Monte Arts Posse. She writes about Latinx women and girls whose narratives aren’t always portrayed in the mainstream. In 2014, she wrote a short story for Bomb Magazine titled “The Vicious Ladies'' — inspired by the news coverage surrounding Emmery Muñoz’s real-life party crew following her murder.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I had never seen anything written about party crews, especially
in the Eli Weekly. I mean, most media, especially at
the time, was very white centric and not really covering
Latino communities. So here was the story that was really
about these young women of color, these Latinas, and then
(00:27):
about this whole culture, this whole underground culture. It wasn't
the culture that we were listening to on the radio
or like watching on TV. This was like totally underground,
even though it was huge. From My Heart's Michael Dura Podcast, Network,
(01:06):
Vice and Elias Studios, this is Party Cruz, the Untold Story.
I'm Janis Yamoca. In this bonus episode, I talked to
writer Caribbean Fragosa. Caribbean Fragosa is a writer, editor, and
(01:53):
co founder of the South Elmante Arts Posse, an arts
collective based out of her hometown South and Monte She
also co edits Boom California, a cultural journal published by
the University of California Press. Most of her work is
focused on Latin X women and girls whose narratives aren't
always portrayed in the mainstream. I first came across her
(02:20):
work because of a short story she wrote for Bomb
Magazine in twenty fourteen. It was titled The Vicious Ladies,
and it was inspired by the news coverage surrounding Emery
Munos's real life party crew. The short story was eventually
published in her twenty twenty one debut collection of stories
titled Eat the Mouth That Beats You. Caribbean was actually
(02:46):
never in a party crew herself, and she grew up
in the nineties, a different generation than mine. But I
felt very seen by her short story, and that's part
of why I wanted to talk to her. The way
I see it, her work captured the spirit of an
all girl party crew, so I wanted to understand what
(03:07):
drew her to write about the scene. Like me, she
grew up in the Sangebreel Valley, so I also wanted
to understand how her own personal experiences shaped how she
writes about the coming of age experience. What was your
(03:32):
familiarity with party crews growing up? My familiarity was always
from the outsider perspective. I'm member in middle school in
particular seeing flyers getting distributed around or seeing posters up.
But really the flyer is something that I saw all
around me, and it was just part of like the
visual culture that I was swimming in and I was
(03:55):
very interested in them, but I was too young to
go back and the time, and there was no way
that my parents were gonna let me go. And then
as I got a little older, some of my friends
were going to these backyard parties or house parties or
ditch parties. And there was a little tiny part of
me that did want to be like a tough girl,
sort of Chola, and did want to go out to
(04:18):
the parties and do whatever I wanted, and I did
want to belong. I did want to feel like I
was with my homegirls, but I wasn't going to go
because I needed to get an a in whatever and
I wasn't going to fall behind. And then also my
mom would kill me. And you know, my mom was
to stay at home mom, and she would find out.
There was no way that I could ditch without her
(04:39):
finding out. Fast forward to two thousand and seven, Caribbean
was fresh out of grad school and it was around
that time that she read an article in Ellie Weekly
called Flying High with the Vicious Ladies by writer Christine Palisk.
Reading about the crews of my generation in a published
magazine made her start thinking about being a team again
(05:01):
and about the tough girls she knew, the ones that
went out to parties, and eventually she would write her
own short story around the themes that interested her. To me,
they represented, I guess, a freedom that I didn't have,
because I knew it was very youth led and it
was a space for young people to sort of do
(05:23):
what they wanted to do, whatever that was, and dress
how they wanted to dress, and just be free, and
that was something that was interesting to me. I was really, really,
really compelled by the idea of creating that a party
crew for only girls and women had been created, and
(05:44):
actually the whole scene, the whole party crew, from what
I saw and what I've learned over the years, was
really like a business really driven by young people or
like adults, but not very old adults. Was really interested
in sort of the di wyeness of the party crew scene,
(06:05):
and I was thinking a lot about how we many
of us have to, especially as creatives, have to create
our own paths professionally. We have to find ways to
hustle and make money. Her short story, The Vicious Ladies
follows a young woman who goes back home after graduating college,
(06:26):
and she finds herself hanging out with the people from
her past, the party crew she left behind. The imagery
in the story was so vivid to me. Caribbean describes
doing nas as a clandestine baptism and flyers in the
air as multi colored snow. I also found that in
some ways I related to the main character too. In
(06:49):
the story, the main character returns to the party crew
scene and doesn't feel like she belongs. When I started
reaching out to old party crew friends, one of my
guy friends told me, I thought you were too good
for us. He said it in a jokey tone, but
I knew he meant it. It felt like her story
hit close to home. Caribbean tells me that the main
(07:11):
character is also a version of her as a young person.
How did you feel growing up in Yeah? I mean,
obviously I felt very at home because that was the
only home I'd always known. Everybody looked like me, talk
like me, sounded like me. Like we're all like these
working class Mexican Mexican American kids with immigrant parents bilingual.
(07:35):
So in that sense, I was just like everybody else.
But I was also always a misfit. I was like
a nerd girl, and I was always proud of it.
I was never ashamed or embarrassed about being like a
nerd and loving literature, loving art. I was always interested
in in culture, and I was very ambitious. I was
(07:57):
I wanted good grades. I wanted to go to college.
Like I grew up with that messaging that college is
the key, education is the key, and so I made
sure to really get those grades. I wanted to be
the top, the best. And for those reasons, it really
put me at odds in different ways with my classmates
and with my peers around me, because they were looking
(08:18):
at the world, in their place in the world differently.
What do you mean by that? I think many people
in our generation understood the message that education is the key,
going to college is the way to in some ways
do better or more than our parents had done or
had been doing. Especially as the children of immigrants, we
(08:39):
have this expectation and this pressure to do more to
make that dangerous migration across the border worth it. And
I certainly grew up with that, and I knew that,
even though it was unspoken among my peers, like we
all shared that expectation. We knew that we were supposed
to progress quote unquote and make good on the American dream,
(09:01):
but it wasn't clear to us how to do that.
And so, you know, a lot of people that I
knew didn't end up going to college. Certainly a bunch did,
but not everybody, And so the working class way of
living continued for a lot of my friends that became
adults and raised children of their own. Hearing you say
(09:23):
like that like unspoken. It's almost like an unspoken pressure
that you have. And like my mom was always I mean,
as an adult, she's always told me, like you need
to be better than me, which hurts, but at the
same time I kind of understand, like I know she
wants or me to be, like she wants to push me.
But it also fell at that time like so like
(09:44):
impossible to like carry for me, at least being sixteen fifteen,
it was just like a lot of weight. There was support,
and then there was of course pressure, and then there
was like the unknowingness, the not knowing really what your
future was supposed to look like. Right, there's supposed to
be bright, and it's supposed to be great, and you're
supposed to be free of financial insecurity, But how does
(10:08):
that work out? Specifically was never really articulated and it's
something that I think many many of us and generations
younger than us, have really been trying to figure out,
like how do we make it? How do we survive
in this world that is supposed to be ours and
it's not, And it just seems to be getting harder
(10:29):
and harder to survive, especially as people of color, and
Caribbean specifically hones in on the expectations placed on women.
As a young woman, I really and as a girl
really at a very young age, I felt that pressure.
(10:52):
I think that's what weighed on me the most, the
gendered expectations of what it means to be a girl
and what it means to grow into a woman and
what that looks like. And as the child of Mexican immigrants, like,
there's very specific expectations of what a girl and a
woman should look like, what we should behave, like, what
(11:13):
kinds of things we should and should not do, And
so I felt those things really weigh on me a lot.
I constantly found ways to push against that. So I
was always and still am like a kind of tomboy.
Caribbean says that adopting a tomboy identity served as a
(11:34):
literal and figurative guardrail from society as a woman, I
felt like sort of disguising my more feminine aspects under
baggy clothes or dark clothes and hoodies and baggy pants
like made me look maybe a little bit like a hoodlum.
But also I felt protected and I was able to
(11:56):
move around in the world a little at least a
tiny bit more. See. It seemed to me it's interesting
hearing your um, like how you were kind of coming
to terms of understanding your own femininity, because I feel
like I kind of went to complete opposite. I was like,
let me be like hyper sexual, like let me show
off my curves, let me show off my legs. My
(12:18):
family's religious, so like I was fighting against that. My
style of dressing was like crop tops and tiny tink
tops and like, wow, it was fashion. Like I was
still like I'm gonna do it because I can't do it,
you know, like because they won't let me or because
they think whatever. Right, It's like i'mm was like, you
(12:42):
can't drink out of the like a beer bottle, and
I was like what I remember I always used to
get like these unsolicited tutorials on how to walk like
a lady. From my DEAs and you're supposed to move
your hips like this, and you're supposed to stand straight
like that, And then on purpose, I would sort of
(13:05):
like slouch and I would just kind of carry myself
like this angry little tomboy in the world. And then
I sort of kept that up throughout college to a
certain extent, like as I tried to find my own
version of femininity, like what is being a girl and
what is it being a woman feel like? And what
(13:27):
feels right to me. We'll be right back. Look more
from Caribbean Ferragosa. Welcome back. I'm speaking to writer and
(14:02):
artists Caribbean Fragosa. As a writer, Caribbean tells me that
when it comes to telling Latin stories, she feels it's
important to be constantly challenging the norm and inviting in
new ideas and voices. I just wanted to know what
is a typical Chicano story. Well, I think the Chicano
(14:23):
stories are often about family and about community. And I
know I write about family and I write about community.
But there's certain like tropes that I find interesting and
then also maybe in need of of rethinking. And I
know that for example, like the Aulita character is one
(14:45):
in particular that has struck me, like there's always an
auelita that is like sweet and making tortillas for you
and this and that. But for me, I love my grandma.
But my grandma did not fit that sort of stereo
type of the aguelita. Like my Mayaguelitas were never that.
They were very strong and angry and um express their
(15:11):
affection and these really strange, sort of aggressive ways for
me and um, like my grandmother when she when she
wanted to express affection to me, she would say, and
I knew that was an expression of love. Like I
knew that was aggressive, but I knew that was like, oh,
my grandma loves me. Because she holding space for women
(15:36):
to be themselves in any way that feels natural, whether
their grandmother's, teens or writers is important to Caribbean. Drawing
inspiration from party crews, she established an online culture and
literary zine for writers. Why did you name your magazine
the Vicious Ladies? Well, I named it the Vicious Ladies
(15:58):
because I had published this story, The Vicious Ladies, which
was directly inspired by the actual Vicious Ladies, and I
felt like over the years I had built like an ethos,
like a real commitment to not just telling the stories
of women and girls and writing about artists that are
(16:20):
women and girls and in fiction also, but through the
publication and Vicious Ladies, which is a sort of online
magazine of cultural criticism, really trying to create safe space.
I was thinking about how I could do it, maybe
not as an actual like party crew, which is not
my thing, but maybe through my thing, which is writing,
(16:41):
especially for younger and emerging writers to enter and start
producing their own bylines. But then I'm also interested in
intellectual and creative safety, and by that I mean creating
or having a space in which people of color can
(17:01):
develop their own sort of decolonized way of speaking of
viewing the world, developing a voice as a writer, as
an intellectual that is unique to us, that can be
bilingual if it wants to be, that can draw on
a whole set of cultural references that are not just
(17:23):
white centric or eurocentric. I guess for me, when I
think about like another safe space, think about where you
can be free or feel like yourself the most. Whether
it's like safe to dance like no one's watching, you know,
I kind of just like be free with your body
and like move and like no one's judging, right. I
(17:47):
had this experience where I didn't create the safe space,
but I sort of felt safe unexpectedly, and there was
a like a like a little DJ collective or something
like that, and they just threw like a party at
some dive bar, like a dirty, ugly little dive bar
in my neighborhood. And I had never gone into that
(18:08):
bar before because it was just like by size, all
men like and everybody's drinking like bud light or cores
and like that's it and like no women ever, So
I'd never gone in there. And they threw like a
party there and I came and I felt good because
(18:30):
there was a whole crew of them. And then they
started playing all these songs from like the eighties, like
from when I was a kid, or early nineties, like
Mexican pop like Magneto and Flan and all these like
things thembidice, and then I just felt like, oh, like
we can just dance here, like we can just be
(18:51):
So I felt like really healed, even though I was
like a whole grown ass woman with like kids and everything,
partying with these like twenty something year olds listening to
music from my childhood, and I just felt like my
like inner baby Caribbean was being healed beyond safe space.
(19:13):
What's interesting is seeing the way Caribbeans work preserved a
moment in time. Even though it's her interpretation, I still
feel like it brought the scene a lie from me again,
and it made me feel like what we experienced was
important and worthy. When people make art, or write stories
or even share old pictures, experiences can become more. They
(19:38):
become a collective memory, a collective history, and that history
is what helps us look back process our experiences, not
just as individuals, but as people living in a society
that doesn't value young women of color. I feel like
Emory's story is just it still repeats itself. I feel
(20:03):
like I read about it too often, in particular too
indigenous women who are murdered or disappeared. I'm thinking about
like the women along the border, I'm thinking about documented women.
I'm thinking about women all over throughout the Americas and
beyond where violence is inflicted. I mean Neonamas, the women
(20:27):
in Mexico, particular Mexico City, that are really speaking out
against violence against women. This is something that continues still today,
and it's still not being addressed efficiently, and I feel
like we need to keep pressing on with that. And
(20:48):
I still want to encourage myself and other women to
keep pushing to keep being rebellious no matter where you're at,
whether you're a married mom with kids, whether you're like
a young person graduating from college, whether you're a teenager.
I think we all have to be in dialogue with
each other across generations. We can all learn from each other.
(21:09):
Like unfortunately, there's still violence, and we still have to
shape the world in a way that is going to
protect us and allow us to grow and change the
world in ways that are good for us. Why is
(21:32):
it important for us to look back? What do you
think it is that pulls us back to our youth,
even if we don't think we want to like revisit
that time. Well, I think there's a lot from our
youth and from the places that we grew up that
needs to be examined, and nobody else is gonna examine
it and think of it in the careful terms that
(21:55):
it requires as much as we do. And there's a
whole generation or a couple generations now that are turning
back to their community to learn about what is valuable,
what is useful? What do we keep? But then a
question that I always return to is not just what
do we keep and what do we value, but also
(22:16):
what has to be thrown out and what does not
serve our communities? And so for one like homophobism or
like machismo, those are things that do not serve us.
So I think that it is valuable to sort of
re examine our youths and re examine the places that
we grew up in and figure out how we can
(22:38):
build productively for our communities and for our future generations.
My last question is what kind of party crew would
you have joined if you could? I think my party
crew would have been more like new wave like, sort
of gothy, maybe punk, kind of mix um with a
(23:03):
lot of Cumbias in there somehow I'm not sure how,
and uh a lover of Mexican pops of Mexican pop
in there. You have to give yourself a name on
the spot. What would your crew name be? Oh, my god,
last Jamaicas. I don't know, Las Jamaicas. Thank you so much, Caribbean,
(23:24):
this is great. Thank you. That was writer and artist
Caribbean Ferragosa. This episode was written reported and hosted by
me Jennie Jamoca. It was produced by Marina Penga, Victoria
(23:47):
Lejandro and Sofia Pelissa Carr. It was edited by Antonia
Sehido and Any Abilis, fact checking by Nidia Bautista. Sound
design and original music composition by Kyle Murdoch. Our supervising
producer is Janet Lee, Art by Julie Ruiz and Victoria Kyon.
(24:08):
Our executive producer from Vice Audio is Kate Osborne. Our
executive producers from Elias Studios are Antonia Siedl and leog
Our Vice president of Podcasts from Elias Studios is Shane
and Naomi Krocmo Party Crews. The Untold Story is a
production of Elias Studios and Vice Audio in partnership with
(24:30):
Ihearts Michael Tura podcast Network. For more podcasts, listen to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Special thanks to the UCLA Department of
Communication Archive for access to their news collection. And Hey,
were you and a party crew? Send us your party
(24:51):
flyers or photos. I'd love to see them, even a
voice message about your memories. Anything. You can send us
a message or a picture at party cruise app at
Elias Studios dot com. Support for this podcast is made
possible by Gordon and Donna Crawford, who believe that quality
journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This
(25:12):
program is made possible in part by the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
I had never seen anything written about party crews, especially
in the Eli Weekly. I mean, most media, especially at
the time, was very white centric and not really covering
Latino communities. So here was the story that was really
about these young women of color, these Latinas, and then
(00:27):
about this whole culture, this whole underground culture. It wasn't
the culture that we were listening to on the radio
or like watching on TV. This was like totally underground,
even though it was huge. From My Heart's Michael Dura Podcast, Network,
(01:06):
Vice and Elias Studios, this is Party Cruz, the Untold Story.
I'm Janis Yamoca. In this bonus episode, I talked to
writer Caribbean Fragosa. Caribbean Fragosa is a writer, editor, and
(01:53):
co founder of the South Elmante Arts Posse, an arts
collective based out of her hometown South and Monte She
also co edits Boom California, a cultural journal published by
the University of California Press. Most of her work is
focused on Latin X women and girls whose narratives aren't
always portrayed in the mainstream. I first came across her
(02:20):
work because of a short story she wrote for Bomb
Magazine in twenty fourteen. It was titled The Vicious Ladies,
and it was inspired by the news coverage surrounding Emery
Munos's real life party crew. The short story was eventually
published in her twenty twenty one debut collection of stories
titled Eat the Mouth That Beats You. Caribbean was actually
(02:46):
never in a party crew herself, and she grew up
in the nineties, a different generation than mine. But I
felt very seen by her short story, and that's part
of why I wanted to talk to her. The way
I see it, her work captured the spirit of an
all girl party crew, so I wanted to understand what
(03:07):
drew her to write about the scene. Like me, she
grew up in the Sangebreel Valley, so I also wanted
to understand how her own personal experiences shaped how she
writes about the coming of age experience. What was your
(03:32):
familiarity with party crews growing up? My familiarity was always
from the outsider perspective. I'm member in middle school in
particular seeing flyers getting distributed around or seeing posters up.
But really the flyer is something that I saw all
around me, and it was just part of like the
visual culture that I was swimming in and I was
(03:55):
very interested in them, but I was too young to
go back and the time, and there was no way
that my parents were gonna let me go. And then
as I got a little older, some of my friends
were going to these backyard parties or house parties or
ditch parties. And there was a little tiny part of
me that did want to be like a tough girl,
sort of Chola, and did want to go out to
(04:18):
the parties and do whatever I wanted, and I did
want to belong. I did want to feel like I
was with my homegirls, but I wasn't going to go
because I needed to get an a in whatever and
I wasn't going to fall behind. And then also my
mom would kill me. And you know, my mom was
to stay at home mom, and she would find out.
There was no way that I could ditch without her
(04:39):
finding out. Fast forward to two thousand and seven, Caribbean
was fresh out of grad school and it was around
that time that she read an article in Ellie Weekly
called Flying High with the Vicious Ladies by writer Christine Palisk.
Reading about the crews of my generation in a published
magazine made her start thinking about being a team again
(05:01):
and about the tough girls she knew, the ones that
went out to parties, and eventually she would write her
own short story around the themes that interested her. To me,
they represented, I guess, a freedom that I didn't have,
because I knew it was very youth led and it
was a space for young people to sort of do
(05:23):
what they wanted to do, whatever that was, and dress
how they wanted to dress, and just be free, and
that was something that was interesting to me. I was really, really,
really compelled by the idea of creating that a party
crew for only girls and women had been created, and
(05:44):
actually the whole scene, the whole party crew, from what
I saw and what I've learned over the years, was
really like a business really driven by young people or
like adults, but not very old adults. Was really interested
in sort of the di wyeness of the party crew scene,
(06:05):
and I was thinking a lot about how we many
of us have to, especially as creatives, have to create
our own paths professionally. We have to find ways to
hustle and make money. Her short story, The Vicious Ladies
follows a young woman who goes back home after graduating college,
(06:26):
and she finds herself hanging out with the people from
her past, the party crew she left behind. The imagery
in the story was so vivid to me. Caribbean describes
doing nas as a clandestine baptism and flyers in the
air as multi colored snow. I also found that in
some ways I related to the main character too. In
(06:49):
the story, the main character returns to the party crew
scene and doesn't feel like she belongs. When I started
reaching out to old party crew friends, one of my
guy friends told me, I thought you were too good
for us. He said it in a jokey tone, but
I knew he meant it. It felt like her story
hit close to home. Caribbean tells me that the main
(07:11):
character is also a version of her as a young person.
How did you feel growing up in Yeah? I mean,
obviously I felt very at home because that was the
only home I'd always known. Everybody looked like me, talk
like me, sounded like me. Like we're all like these
working class Mexican Mexican American kids with immigrant parents bilingual.
(07:35):
So in that sense, I was just like everybody else.
But I was also always a misfit. I was like
a nerd girl, and I was always proud of it.
I was never ashamed or embarrassed about being like a
nerd and loving literature, loving art. I was always interested
in in culture, and I was very ambitious. I was
(07:57):
I wanted good grades. I wanted to go to college.
Like I grew up with that messaging that college is
the key, education is the key, and so I made
sure to really get those grades. I wanted to be
the top, the best. And for those reasons, it really
put me at odds in different ways with my classmates
and with my peers around me, because they were looking
(08:18):
at the world, in their place in the world differently.
What do you mean by that? I think many people
in our generation understood the message that education is the key,
going to college is the way to in some ways
do better or more than our parents had done or
had been doing. Especially as the children of immigrants, we
(08:39):
have this expectation and this pressure to do more to
make that dangerous migration across the border worth it. And
I certainly grew up with that, and I knew that,
even though it was unspoken among my peers, like we
all shared that expectation. We knew that we were supposed
to progress quote unquote and make good on the American dream,
(09:01):
but it wasn't clear to us how to do that.
And so, you know, a lot of people that I
knew didn't end up going to college. Certainly a bunch did,
but not everybody, And so the working class way of
living continued for a lot of my friends that became
adults and raised children of their own. Hearing you say
(09:23):
like that like unspoken. It's almost like an unspoken pressure
that you have. And like my mom was always I mean,
as an adult, she's always told me, like you need
to be better than me, which hurts, but at the
same time I kind of understand, like I know she
wants or me to be, like she wants to push me.
But it also fell at that time like so like
(09:44):
impossible to like carry for me, at least being sixteen fifteen,
it was just like a lot of weight. There was support,
and then there was of course pressure, and then there
was like the unknowingness, the not knowing really what your
future was supposed to look like. Right, there's supposed to
be bright, and it's supposed to be great, and you're
supposed to be free of financial insecurity, But how does
(10:08):
that work out? Specifically was never really articulated and it's
something that I think many many of us and generations
younger than us, have really been trying to figure out,
like how do we make it? How do we survive
in this world that is supposed to be ours and
it's not, And it just seems to be getting harder
(10:29):
and harder to survive, especially as people of color, and
Caribbean specifically hones in on the expectations placed on women.
As a young woman, I really and as a girl
really at a very young age, I felt that pressure.
(10:52):
I think that's what weighed on me the most, the
gendered expectations of what it means to be a girl
and what it means to grow into a woman and
what that looks like. And as the child of Mexican immigrants, like,
there's very specific expectations of what a girl and a
woman should look like, what we should behave, like, what
(11:13):
kinds of things we should and should not do, And
so I felt those things really weigh on me a lot.
I constantly found ways to push against that. So I
was always and still am like a kind of tomboy.
Caribbean says that adopting a tomboy identity served as a
(11:34):
literal and figurative guardrail from society as a woman, I
felt like sort of disguising my more feminine aspects under
baggy clothes or dark clothes and hoodies and baggy pants
like made me look maybe a little bit like a hoodlum.
But also I felt protected and I was able to
(11:56):
move around in the world a little at least a
tiny bit more. See. It seemed to me it's interesting
hearing your um, like how you were kind of coming
to terms of understanding your own femininity, because I feel
like I kind of went to complete opposite. I was like,
let me be like hyper sexual, like let me show
off my curves, let me show off my legs. My
(12:18):
family's religious, so like I was fighting against that. My
style of dressing was like crop tops and tiny tink
tops and like, wow, it was fashion. Like I was
still like I'm gonna do it because I can't do it,
you know, like because they won't let me or because
they think whatever. Right, It's like i'mm was like, you
(12:42):
can't drink out of the like a beer bottle, and
I was like what I remember I always used to
get like these unsolicited tutorials on how to walk like
a lady. From my DEAs and you're supposed to move
your hips like this, and you're supposed to stand straight
like that, And then on purpose, I would sort of
(13:05):
like slouch and I would just kind of carry myself
like this angry little tomboy in the world. And then
I sort of kept that up throughout college to a
certain extent, like as I tried to find my own
version of femininity, like what is being a girl and
what is it being a woman feel like? And what
(13:27):
feels right to me. We'll be right back. Look more
from Caribbean Ferragosa. Welcome back. I'm speaking to writer and
(14:02):
artists Caribbean Fragosa. As a writer, Caribbean tells me that
when it comes to telling Latin stories, she feels it's
important to be constantly challenging the norm and inviting in
new ideas and voices. I just wanted to know what
is a typical Chicano story. Well, I think the Chicano
(14:23):
stories are often about family and about community. And I
know I write about family and I write about community.
But there's certain like tropes that I find interesting and
then also maybe in need of of rethinking. And I
know that for example, like the Aulita character is one
(14:45):
in particular that has struck me, like there's always an
auelita that is like sweet and making tortillas for you
and this and that. But for me, I love my grandma.
But my grandma did not fit that sort of stereo
type of the aguelita. Like my Mayaguelitas were never that.
They were very strong and angry and um express their
(15:11):
affection and these really strange, sort of aggressive ways for
me and um, like my grandmother when she when she
wanted to express affection to me, she would say, and
I knew that was an expression of love. Like I
knew that was aggressive, but I knew that was like, oh,
my grandma loves me. Because she holding space for women
(15:36):
to be themselves in any way that feels natural, whether
their grandmother's, teens or writers is important to Caribbean. Drawing
inspiration from party crews, she established an online culture and
literary zine for writers. Why did you name your magazine
the Vicious Ladies? Well, I named it the Vicious Ladies
(15:58):
because I had published this story, The Vicious Ladies, which
was directly inspired by the actual Vicious Ladies, and I
felt like over the years I had built like an ethos,
like a real commitment to not just telling the stories
of women and girls and writing about artists that are
(16:20):
women and girls and in fiction also, but through the
publication and Vicious Ladies, which is a sort of online
magazine of cultural criticism, really trying to create safe space.
I was thinking about how I could do it, maybe
not as an actual like party crew, which is not
my thing, but maybe through my thing, which is writing,
(16:41):
especially for younger and emerging writers to enter and start
producing their own bylines. But then I'm also interested in
intellectual and creative safety, and by that I mean creating
or having a space in which people of color can
(17:01):
develop their own sort of decolonized way of speaking of
viewing the world, developing a voice as a writer, as
an intellectual that is unique to us, that can be
bilingual if it wants to be, that can draw on
a whole set of cultural references that are not just
(17:23):
white centric or eurocentric. I guess for me, when I
think about like another safe space, think about where you
can be free or feel like yourself the most. Whether
it's like safe to dance like no one's watching, you know,
I kind of just like be free with your body
and like move and like no one's judging, right. I
(17:47):
had this experience where I didn't create the safe space,
but I sort of felt safe unexpectedly, and there was
a like a like a little DJ collective or something
like that, and they just threw like a party at
some dive bar, like a dirty, ugly little dive bar
in my neighborhood. And I had never gone into that
(18:08):
bar before because it was just like by size, all
men like and everybody's drinking like bud light or cores
and like that's it and like no women ever, So
I'd never gone in there. And they threw like a
party there and I came and I felt good because
(18:30):
there was a whole crew of them. And then they
started playing all these songs from like the eighties, like
from when I was a kid, or early nineties, like
Mexican pop like Magneto and Flan and all these like
things thembidice, and then I just felt like, oh, like
we can just dance here, like we can just be
(18:51):
So I felt like really healed, even though I was
like a whole grown ass woman with like kids and everything,
partying with these like twenty something year olds listening to
music from my childhood, and I just felt like my
like inner baby Caribbean was being healed beyond safe space.
(19:13):
What's interesting is seeing the way Caribbeans work preserved a
moment in time. Even though it's her interpretation, I still
feel like it brought the scene a lie from me again,
and it made me feel like what we experienced was
important and worthy. When people make art, or write stories
or even share old pictures, experiences can become more. They
(19:38):
become a collective memory, a collective history, and that history
is what helps us look back process our experiences, not
just as individuals, but as people living in a society
that doesn't value young women of color. I feel like
Emory's story is just it still repeats itself. I feel
(20:03):
like I read about it too often, in particular too
indigenous women who are murdered or disappeared. I'm thinking about
like the women along the border, I'm thinking about documented women.
I'm thinking about women all over throughout the Americas and
beyond where violence is inflicted. I mean Neonamas, the women
(20:27):
in Mexico, particular Mexico City, that are really speaking out
against violence against women. This is something that continues still today,
and it's still not being addressed efficiently, and I feel
like we need to keep pressing on with that. And
(20:48):
I still want to encourage myself and other women to
keep pushing to keep being rebellious no matter where you're at,
whether you're a married mom with kids, whether you're like
a young person graduating from college, whether you're a teenager.
I think we all have to be in dialogue with
each other across generations. We can all learn from each other.
(21:09):
Like unfortunately, there's still violence, and we still have to
shape the world in a way that is going to
protect us and allow us to grow and change the
world in ways that are good for us. Why is
(21:32):
it important for us to look back? What do you
think it is that pulls us back to our youth,
even if we don't think we want to like revisit
that time. Well, I think there's a lot from our
youth and from the places that we grew up that
needs to be examined, and nobody else is gonna examine
it and think of it in the careful terms that
(21:55):
it requires as much as we do. And there's a
whole generation or a couple generations now that are turning
back to their community to learn about what is valuable,
what is useful? What do we keep? But then a
question that I always return to is not just what
do we keep and what do we value, but also
(22:16):
what has to be thrown out and what does not
serve our communities? And so for one like homophobism or
like machismo, those are things that do not serve us.
So I think that it is valuable to sort of
re examine our youths and re examine the places that
we grew up in and figure out how we can
(22:38):
build productively for our communities and for our future generations.
My last question is what kind of party crew would
you have joined if you could? I think my party
crew would have been more like new wave like, sort
of gothy, maybe punk, kind of mix um with a
(23:03):
lot of Cumbias in there somehow I'm not sure how,
and uh a lover of Mexican pops of Mexican pop
in there. You have to give yourself a name on
the spot. What would your crew name be? Oh, my god,
last Jamaicas. I don't know, Las Jamaicas. Thank you so much, Caribbean,
(23:24):
this is great. Thank you. That was writer and artist
Caribbean Ferragosa. This episode was written reported and hosted by
me Jennie Jamoca. It was produced by Marina Penga, Victoria
(23:47):
Lejandro and Sofia Pelissa Carr. It was edited by Antonia
Sehido and Any Abilis, fact checking by Nidia Bautista. Sound
design and original music composition by Kyle Murdoch. Our supervising
producer is Janet Lee, Art by Julie Ruiz and Victoria Kyon.
(24:08):
Our executive producer from Vice Audio is Kate Osborne. Our
executive producers from Elias Studios are Antonia Siedl and leog
Our Vice president of Podcasts from Elias Studios is Shane
and Naomi Krocmo Party Crews. The Untold Story is a
production of Elias Studios and Vice Audio in partnership with
(24:30):
Ihearts Michael Tura podcast Network. For more podcasts, listen to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Special thanks to the UCLA Department of
Communication Archive for access to their news collection. And Hey,
were you and a party crew? Send us your party
(24:51):
flyers or photos. I'd love to see them, even a
voice message about your memories. Anything. You can send us
a message or a picture at party cruise app at
Elias Studios dot com. Support for this podcast is made
possible by Gordon and Donna Crawford, who believe that quality
journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This
(25:12):
program is made possible in part by the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
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