What is Ethnic Studies Anyway?

Most colleges don't have an ethnic studies department, so its a fair question. Its a question we tried to address in this year's graduation speech. I'm putting up part that I wrote:

"In Ethnic Studies we read this book Borderlands by this woman Gloria Anzaldua. She says the US would rather she not be Chicana, that her community would rather she not be indigenous, and no one seemed to want her to be a woman, especially not a queer woman, but she continued to write those between spaces, in the borderlands.

And I realized that being mixed is somewhere. I exist in and between spaces of Asian and white. I’m not half of anything. This is Ethnic Studies, to find wisdom from a woman like and not like me. She gave me words to feelings I knew and did not know I had. And now, like her, I proclaim: don’t give me your tenets and laws. Don’t give me your luke warms gods. What I want is an accounting from all three cultures. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar, and my own feminist architecture.

We declare that our personal lives are political, and when we know this, our lives make sense. We are undocumented immigrants, and the children of immigrants and doctors. We have been told we are too loud, too belligerent, too bold, too queer, too academic, not academic enough, too white to be in Ethnic Studies, so black we must be athletes. I proclaim our lives political and our lives are in our hands."