When I returned to Austin, TX, my hometown, after four years away completing my undergraduate degree in Atlanta, GA, I had to grapple with a new understanding of the city after a long time away. Austin had been undergoing a rapid change, an unprecedented growth that was neither sustainable nor slow. Gentrification is a very real problem here, and the Austin that I once knew as a child had changed.
With this change, I also began to understand that before, I was not very connected with the Mexican American community in Austin. In college I had been involved in Latinas Unidas and had experienced the diversity of the Latinx and Caribbean communities in Atlanta through our community outreach and activities. Coming back to Austin meant understanding my latinidad in new ways. Still, it wasn’t until I met my friend Sarah during my first year of my MFA in fiction writing and met up with her at Resistencia Bookstore at the current location on east Cesar Chavez that I understood the legacy of Chicanx and indigenous activism in the community, and wishing I had been more a part of it. Resistencia is a small, non profit bookstore and community space founded by poet and activist raul r. salinas and has been in Austin for over forty years. The current location is in a small building that always smells faintly of sage (burned during various activities and community ceremonies), with natural light pouring in through the windows, the beautiful, towering live oak trees casting shadows on the blinds as they sway in the wind.
Resistencia (Red Salmon Arts) has since become a fixture in my life. I have attended ceremonies and readings there, lead workshops there as a community teaching artist, helped out at events to sell books. I’ve worked there when the store was empty. Once, during a particularly bad migraine attack before an event, I napped on the floor, feeling utterly comfortable and safe. This space is a testament to how I feel enveloped by this place, and the community love that is imbued in its walls. Resistencia would not feel this way without the people that make it what it is, especially the current caretaker and director of Red Salmon Arts, the non profit branch of the store, Lilia Rosas. It is through Lilia that I have been able to teach in the space, and it is her who agreed to sponsor Lenguas Loc@s as a collective. raul is no longer here with us, but he predicted that Resistencia would one day be successful in the hands of women.
Each time Lenguas Loc@s meets at Resistencia, my stress, pain or anxiety melts away. Sometimes when we are all busy, our monthly meetings are the only times that I get to see some of my friends and community members. During these workshops, I feel my shoulders unclench, I return my breathing to normal, and I feel utterly safe in a space where we are all invested in one another’s progress and healing. LL, and the communities that meets at Resistencia Bookstore have made me grow as a writer and community organizer. They have made me see that community can hold us close, and push us to be our best selves.
If you can, please consider supporting this community space it struggles against gentrification in East Austin.
Much love and light,
Leticia U.
