blueprints

Tia Chucha Comes Home | 63
size of Oakland—mostly Mexican and Central American people. Yet the
area lacked a bookstore, an art gallery, a movie house, or decent cultural
space. Trini was disappointed that not much had changed since she left her
Northeast Valley home twenty-five years earlier. After buying a decent
home in the city of San Fernando, I didn’t need to get a sports car or a
swimming pool. Instead, with the extra money that came my way, I invested
in Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural, a café, bookstore, workshop center, art gallery,
and performance space in Sylmar, California.
Trini, my brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez, and I built a full coffee bar
with an espresso machine, roaster, grinder, deli cases, refrigerator, ice-making
machine, sinks, wood cabinets, and stock shelving. We had portable
wood shelves for books, a small gallery space, and a Mayan-motif look
throughout the store. Trini picked out amazing, warm, earth-tone colors.
We obtained our first inventory of books. And we hired a manager and a
young café employee.
That was in December 2001. The Liberty Hill Foundation provided a
three-year social entrepreneur grant to supplement what I put into the
place. We even had a Navajo elder (Trini had been adopted by Anthony Lee
and his family on the rez a few years before), local friends, and Chicago
friends from YSS in attendance during a community blessing.
We were ready to rock this world.
A DREAM OF COMMUNITy EMPOWERMENT
One of the first things we did was set up a weekly open mic. Poets read,
spoken word artists performed, people sang, and guitarists played. To accommodate
the Spanish-speaking community, we held a weekly Noches Bohemias
for Spanish-language performers. I showed up during the first years
to read my work and encourage others. Other L.A.-area poets included
Poets of the Round Table, In Lak Ech (a Chicana women’s poetry group),
and Street Poets. Multigenre groups such as the Chicano hip-hop group El
Vuh, the Spanish-language rock band Noxtiel, the punk-Aztec-traditional
Mexican group Hijos de la Tierra, and the Peruvian music–based band
Raices started up at Tia Chucha’s, along with theater outfits such as Tres
Chingasos and Teatro Chucheros. We soon had our own resident Mexika
(so-called Aztec) danza group called Temachtia Quetzalcoatl. Authors such
as Sandra Cisneros, Ruben Martinez, Victor Villasenor, Adrienne Rich,
Denise Chavez, and Wanda Coleman graced our stage. The music ranged