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By: Sophia Renee Marquez Berestecky
An Interview with Angélica and Marie Acevedo.mp3An interview with Angélica (they/them) and Marie (she/her) Acevedo by Sophia Berestecky
Sunday, January 26th was still early enough in the year for everything to still feel unreal. It was still early enough since inauguration day for the world to seem utterly stopped.
A wedding was taking place.
I went early with my mom and sister to help set it up. It’s a weird feeling when you help put an event together because you can never really tell when it actually started. It all becomes this big nonlinear build up of anticipation and then an eventual slow fade away at your inevitable departure. This was my experience as a guest at the wedding of Angélica and Marie Acevedo.
Angélica and Marie Acevedo photographed by Jordan Kwiatkowski
Titusville, Florida from Homes.com
Angélica told me about growing up in Titusville, a mostly quiet city on Florida’s east coast, but they recalled the NASA shuttles going off so forcefully that it would rock the pool water back and forth. As a kid, the magic of things is always amplified. The lapping water must have been simply enchanting.
They grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist Puerto Rican family of five. The religion first came to Puerto Rico in the 1800s with the Spanish and now hispanics make up 15% of all Seventh-day Adventists. Angélica attended Seventh-day Adventist schools their whole life. It was a huge aspect of their childhood, but it’s also been a source of turmoil .
The first time they told an adult in their life that they thought they liked girls, it didn’t go well. This person’s reaction was a reminder that this wasn’t something that was going to be accepted. This scenario is very common in religious Latino (as well as other immigrants) households. There’s a very heavy silence about things because of the fear that they, as minorities, would break their assimilated identity in America. But this identity is one that can never be assumed because it is conventionally European and white; entirely and forever at odds with Angélica, a queer Puerto Rican.
CALEB members from Knoxville News Sentinel
Despite their childhood spread across both Florida and Georgia, Angélica settled in Chattanooga and intends to stay here. “When people ask me where I’m from, I’m close to just saying I’m from Chattanooga.” Over the years, Chattanooga has seen a small arts movement, especially in the Black community. Aside from their career in community organizing, Angélica has expressed their desire for pursuing something in visual arts, a fitting duology of interests for this riverside city.
Currently, they work for CALEB, a coalition of faith communities, labor unions, nonprofit, and community leaders. More specifically, they work on the education task force which looks at the school to prison pipeline and restorative practices. A few months ago, they were thinking about leaving organizing work for creative art, but they expressed, “I would feel really, really guilty if I bounced right now. And I don't know if that's healthy to be completely frank, but that's how I've been feeling and I'm not the only one.” They’ve dedicated their life to community organizing and social justice work; and right now, that work is becoming harder than ever.
It’s easy to completely focus on the negatives, but Angélica has a more positive interpretation. “I think strictly as an organizer, as difficult as these moments are, they're actually our biggest opportunities, because when people are pissed and they’re experiencing the real life consequences of systems and they’re coming face to face with oppression, they want to fight back.”
There’s a shared tension in the air, felt in silence and felt when there is chaos. But humans are intrinsically drawn to a sense of the collective. For people who have only ever encountered power as oppression, community is often the only way of building anything real. Power of the people over the people in power, as organizers like to say.
Angélica isn’t particularly religious, but I think they put this emotion perfectly, “I think truly in the midst of all this, I really want people to know that hope and faith isn’t just this blind thing that we’re holding on to to not lose our freaking minds … It is an investment in the actual power of the people,”
Marie and Angélica Acevedo photographed by Jordan Kwiatkowski
And that’s what this wedding was. A portal to a perfect, honeyed world that everyone could step into and revel in for an evening. Angélica and Marie described the wedding as a dream, further explaining, “It really made a lot of us appreciate the little things again when things just kinda felt like the world was literally stopping. Like … frozen in time or ending, you know?”
Marie and Angélica Acevedo photographed by Jordan Kwiatkowski
The wedding of Angélica and Marie Acevedo was beyond a celebration of their bond, it was an expression of collective joy and faith in the people. Angélica closed out the interview by saying, “We are all living examples that this is real and winning, every day.”
Angélica and Marie Acevedo photographed by Jordan Kwiatkowski
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