Matt Garcia: So what you were doing, like the old saying Chicanos aren't born they're made. So you were being made into a Chicana.
Socorro Gomez-Potter: I was being made into a Chicana because I was very much a Mexicana. I had had assimilation experience with ms. Berg and learning to sing we are climbing Jacob's ladder. Now I sing it in my own church and it always takes me back to my 4 H meetings but I went through a period when I wanted to make it in the structure and it’s not that I wanted to do away with the structure , it’s just that I realized that the structure wasn’t made me for me. There were gatekeepers within that process designed to keep me out because America had determined that i had to follow the footsteps of my parents and be a migrant farm worker. That’s why I was brought here. That’s why it was ok for my parents to come here because they were going to be laborers and their family was to be laborers, and that’s ok. But if one of their kids wanted to be anything different it was going to take stepping out of the mold and a huge battle. Basically that’s what my experience was, even with the EOP program,. It opened the door and it made it possible for us but it was still very much a battle. We were only 21 minority students on the campus. I believe there’s like 3000 or 5000 students there at the time , I don’t remember.
Matt Garcia: And that includes all Blacks , Asians?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: For that year their class would be at 21. I have to think back but there might have been 21 Mexicans because the MEChA group was about 21 Mexicans.
Matt Garcia: Did MEChA already exist when you got there?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: MEChA existed when I got there.
Matt Garcia: But just barely?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: Barely.
Matt Garcia: MEChA was born in 68 and you got there in 69 , so you were like nearly a founding member.
Socorro Gomez-Potter: Actually it was like organizing a MEChA unit there and the leadership was under two Chicanos from Banning, Jorge and Sal Rios and they were true machistas, not mechistas but machistas and they didn’t want any females involved in the leadership at all and if they did they could be secretaries. They were both coming up from the junior college, which is San Bernardino Valley college and they controlled the MEChA at Valley and they dictated to the females . The females could cook at their meetings and the females could do certain things but they could never aspire to a position of leadership. When they came to Cal State with Richard’s inspiration and leadership , we had assumed the leadership of the MEChA, we meaning Ana, Analea Torres, my friend, my roommate and myself and we had a guy for vice-president, Richard Morales. We were having to battle for positions even within MEChA because the Chicanos were so wacked in their thinking in terms of women.
Matt Garcia: So you were already running the show...
Socorro Gomez-Potter: Actually we took it over.
Matt Garcia: How did you do it?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: I’m trying to remember. Basically it caused a huge disruption in the organization but we had the advice of Richard and Richard advised us to petition to the student activities director and we organized with the girls on campus, there were more girls on campus than there were guys and we had elections and we defeated the guys. we also through the activities director petitioned for funding and this is interesting matt, guess what we asked for funding for? You are going to think it’s ironic. For a symposium. I didn’t even know what the word symposium meant but Richard Gonzalez put a proposal together for us , or helped us get a proposal together for us to present to the activities director for money for a Chicano symposium. Around that agenda because MEChA on campus wasn’t doing anything so when the women took it over we organized a food drive for the united farm workers, cultural activities once a month on the quad and the Chicano symposium. For the Chicano symposium we invited people to come from the united farm workers. Someone came from Davis. _________ came from Davis. It was the emergence of the Chicano. We had somebody speak on the Chicano moratorium. The moratorium, the movement against the Vietnam War.
Matt Garcia: Did you go to the eventual march ?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: No but they both did. My roommates both did and i stayed home that day because I worked. So that happened Matt, that actually happened on campus. We got the funding and we did the food drive. We gathered a huge truck. At the same time the politics around San Bernardino were very interesting. All the little groups were trying to come together under one bug group called the Co-fraternidad and we used to go to meetings in Fontana. Some of the groups that you mentioned in your book were present and they would come from all over the inland empire and the shirt issue that you brought up about our father, I don’t know how many meeting I went to the co-fraternidad and they never got past the what they were going to call themselves. This huge arguments over it. But the co-fraternidad really helped us because they provided us with trucks to move all this food from Cal State and from the places where we had stored it to Coachella. We made a big convoy and the people from the United Farm Workers came and picked up the food and we drove it to the union’s office in Coachella. We used to play union songs right on the quad and people would think we were crazy. I mean there was only 21 of us , but like i said at that time just changing the way you look in college was something because we were transitioning from this very proper dress attire to how college students looked during the time of protesting the Vietnam War.
Matt Garcia: Did you have the brown berets?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: No we did not have brown berets on campus, we did not. But we used to wear the brown berets even though we were not brown berets. It was also a time of being very reactionary to all kinds of political trends and voices that were surfacing, the war in Vietnam and all the voices against the war. The Sexual revolution that was coming across the whole country and how the Chicanos would fit into that. The politics of repressing what has been unleashed as the civil rights movement, that was just right there . I just happened . Johnson put into action the war on poverty, affirmative action was part of it. But so were many other things and community activism was encouraged as part of poverty and civil rights.
Matt Garcia: Where was it encouraged?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: within our community. You know i had a conversation with Cary about getting endorsements from the urban league and he says they don’t have a ___________. No one is politicized in the community anymore. No one has notion about the politics that move around it . They way that any Joe blow would be able to break it down to you in the 60s. We had no community activism anymore. Not at that level. I remember walking down Mount Vernon and there would be a community contact office where you could walk in there and find out all kinds of things that were happening in the community. Francis Grice would have her office for the Blacks just a few blocks down. You would have MAPA who had an office on Mount Vernon. MAPA had an office on Mount Vernon! The Mexican American political association. Everybody had a notion of the politics that were moving and the excitement that was moving in that era. People, I think at least in the circle that I was involved made decisions based on the political agendas. Moral decisions based on political agendas. We don’t have that. They sold all of that out for a nice house and nice cars , I guess. I don’t see people having that kind of passion about doing what’s morally right or socially right or for the greatest advantage... Doing it with this idealism about life.
Matt Garcia: What were your politics then? Like you were motivated by politics , so what would you say our politics were?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: They were politics first of all being included and being part of not mainstream, but being included in a way that mattered. Having a voice and being heard and being acknowledged as a contributor , whether it meant having a Chicano paper that we threw to every business and every house and walked it ourselves. Or whether it meant brining the Teatro Campesino to Cal State and have them perform and have everyone acknowledge it as a form of art and celebrate it and at the same time send the message of the struggle of the farm worker to everybody who had no clue. The day that we petitioned to the activities director for money , he said you think you guys have an agenda. I can have more women angry right now about the fact that we don’t have a feminist program than you can muster Mexicans from mount Vernon to make the trip to cal state. That’s what he told us.
Matt Garcia: What did you do?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: That may be true, i said, but you happen to have the Mexicans in your office now. That may be true but the Mexicans are in your office now. I think that’s what it was about. It was about I may have just come here but Mexicans have been here a long long time and their voice needs to be heard and their contribution has to be acknowledged and their process of getting here has to be less painful and more secure for other people. I because so impassioned about making college accessible and not painful. It shouldn’t be something that is like to there for just a select few. That’s still a passion for me.
Matt Garcia: It’s interesting how this administrator juxtaposed feminism with the Chicano movement and racism, so what was your perspective on feminism at the time?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: I’m going to make another not very good comparison. When they draw the parallel between gay and lesbian rights and say it’s just like a minority right , it angers me. It’s a comparison that I don’t even want to go there. But that’s how i feel. I’m a chicana but Chicano is first than being chicana. The minority issue is before the feminist issue. It’s an issue of equality as a woman is as real as the other one. One is owned within my own community i think. One is within my family. I had to earn the right to be an equal in my own family and I was empowered by a father that allowed us to be equal and to a certain extent gave us freedom beyond my brother. My father took the risk of allowing one of his daughters to go into the army and the other one to go off to college when everybody told him all he was going to get was two pregnant women. everybody used to tease him about it and he still allowed it, maybe because there was so many of us, 5 girls and one boy he had no choice. But my father used to say marriage is so painful and so difficult and I would almost rather see you not married and at the time i didn’t know what he was talking about but he was talking about the role of a woman in the Mexican marriage under what would have been normal expectations for his daughters. So very much a chicana, somewhat of a feminist but much more of a chicana.
Matt Garcia: So would you say , you had those struggles with the men in MEChA , would you say that that was a form of Chicana feminism or what would you call that?
Socorro Gomez-Potter: It was definitely a struggle . A struggle of acknowledging you for who you are and acknowledging you as a person. some people will acknowledge you as less of a person for being a woman. Just like some people acknowledge you as being less of a human for being Mexican or dark haired or speaking with an accent. It’s no different.
Matt Garcia: But still the struggle as a Chicano was more ...
Socorro Gomez-Potter: Of a purpose for me. Like right now matt, I don’t want anything to become a distraction from dual language, even me. I never wanted the word Chicano to become a distraction to anybody. if they want to call me Mexican . Call me Mexican American, hyphenated or non hyphenated I don't care. Call me whatever you want but lets continue on making an access to higher education available to more kids. Let's continue to make the contribution of Mexicanos across this country known to everybody and let us continue to work on making us profit from the market that we bring to the world. Let us continue to make life easier for all those people that are struggling to get here with a dream of an easier life. We're still coming, we’re still making a huge contribution to this country and we're still seeing this traction.
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