divine spirit, divine source, God, whatever you wanna call it

My name is Robin, I use she/her/hers as my pronouns, and I've lived in Southern Oregon since 2015, so I guess that's seven years.

Can you tell me about an experience where you discovered something about yourself or your family that you hadn't known before? I've been doing a lot of genealogy and I have found that I have a lot of queer relatives, which is very unusual and not... we know that 15 to 20% of the population is queer, but my family is traditionally Mexican American, so these things are not spoken of very much, and so I learned that we have probably a larger number of queer relatives than average; and their experience of being queer and coming out at is actually very different depending on the geographical area the family member lived in and which relative they grew up with. That's what I didn't know before, and I'll go into more detail on your next question.

Could you tell a story about a queer relative? And what is your relationship to this person? I have a queer relative that I just discovered about six months ago, a First Cousin, who lives Fresno. She came out to her family at 16. She knew she was queer before then, but chose that age to inform her mother of her sexuality. Her mother immediately announced this to the entire family and her younger brother, so close in age that they were like twins, disowned her. My Cousin left the family shortly after that, and he has never since spoken to her. She created her own life after that and has been with her partner for 30 years now. They have an adopted daughter and an adopted grandson. So they have a full life together. But even though she lives in the same town as her brother, he still turns and walks in the other direction when he sees her. It's very sad. On the flip side, I have other relatives that live in Gilroy, where I have a Trans Cousin and the whole family was very supportive of his transition and was embraced by his family. That Cousin is in their mid-20s, and my Fresno Cousin in her late 50’s, so I think it's a generational thing.

Could you speak a little bit more about the genealogy part, what your experience has been over the last several months in discovering all that? It's been about a year, and I started with one relative that I knew of, and then I did my DNA and suddenly my family tree grew pretty dramatically. The search has been not for my immediate family, (because it's just my mother and father and I know their genealogy), but for my grandmother, who is a great mystery to everyone. I've been trying to dig up information on Helen. I just kept widening the tree to see if there was anybody who had any information about Helen, especially when she was younger. And so from there, I've been kind of uncovered, the skeletons in the closet! All sorts of stories have arisen, and there are queer family members all the way through the line, and stories about them that I hadn’t expected. I have an aunt. She went by several different names, but most people knew her as Ruby. Her nickname was Tía Chicken, because she had chicken legs. She ran away from her husband and family and fell for a teenage girl when she was in her mid 30’s. It was a great scandal, and she disappeared because she was with someone so young… and a woman.

Are there any other reflections or thoughts that you have around discovering these parts of yourself and your family? I know that when I was younger, I've always been very fluid, and I've never really named it, but I've always been this way. I remember telling my mother about a crush that I had on a girl when I was 14, and she managed to tell absolutely everybody in my little world, that she thought I was a lesbian. I was embarrassed because my mother was sharing something that I told her in confidence. I knew I wasn’t a Lesbian, but at the time I did not know about sexual fluidity. I didn't realize that there was a history of shaming until I did the genealogy; and this behavior has been going on for a long time in our family.

The severity of the shaming depended on what generation you were born into and which branch of the family you were raised in. To this day there are family members still in the closet with their parents in their 40’s and 50’s. We are living in 2022 for goodness sake! I find this all very sad.

Could you tell me about a story where you experienced queer joy living in Southern Oregon? I think the only time that I felt queer joy was a drag show that was presented by OSF employees. I think they only did two drag shows over two years, and this was maybe... Gosh, it was pre-covid, so probably four years ago at the Black Swan Theater. I didn't know until I started working for OSF that a lot of the company members do have little side projects that they present at the Black Swan, and perform late at night, after the Festival performances. They space was packed, and there were drag queens from all over the state. One of the staff members, I don't even know if they're still working for OSF, is a drag queen, so he put it together. It was amazing because it was the first time in Southern Oregon that I saw a full on drag show; and because I had grown up in New York City, lived in LA and San Francisco, I knew what quality drag looked like. This drag show was of that caliber and it was in Southern Oregon! It was embraced by everyone, and I took a neighbor to the show who had never seen a drag performance. It was eye-opening for her!

Could you tell a story about an adventure you've been on while you've lived here? I guess my definition of adventure is more adventurous than people in Southern Oregon would have, so I've really not had an adventure. I could tell you about adventures, but not from here. I think an adventure happened when I was living in Mount Shasta. Because I've grown up in really large cities and lived in large cities, I didn't realize how incredible nature is around here. There was a day we drove to the lower Klamath Lake, and I saw Bald Eagles sitting on tree branches 20 feet away from me! Swooping down for food, they're humongous, humongous. They're amazing birds. I've never seen anything like that in my life, Golden Eagles as well. I went back a couple more times, but the first time was actually the best because the Eagles were so close and there were so many of them.

What makes you stay here and what makes you wanna go? Nothing makes me stay here and everything makes me want to go... I first moved to Ashland because I had been going to OSF for 20 years off and on. Wherever I was living at the time, I would visit once, sometimes twice a year, and so that was a big pull for me. I knew Ashland really well and was actually very excited to move to Ashland from Northern California. For the first couple of years, I was really enthralled with going to plays and all the extracurricular things that are connected to OSF, and how so many people in town are theater buffs. You can go into a cafe and talk about the plays. People, at least on the surface, were very generous. But as time went on, the vibe of Ashland significantly changed. It's very different from 20 years ago, but has dramatically changed in the last 5 years. A lot of people are moving away because they can’t afford housing anymore. People from other states, specifically California, were coming in, and they were much more affluent and much more privileged than the base population of Ashland. This has pushed out a LOT of people.There's great generosity in Ashland, but there's also white privilege, and that's not evident until you start really living in the town. People were very kind to me the first couple of years, because I was struggling financially. Once I stabilized I was able to look a bit deeper and realized that there is an underbelly to the town.

A few years ago, an OSF company member named Christiana Clark was walking her dog in a neighborhood I lived relatively close to, and a man just passed her on a bike and told her she lived in a state where he could kill her if he wanted to (Oregon is pretty much a white supremacist state, which I also didn't know about before I moved to Oregon), and she was shaken. It was right before Juneteenth, and OSF hosts a Juneteenth celebration every year. She had been the MC for a couple of years, and was that year, and she talked about it. It was a big deal in the town because it really showed, for the first time in a very overt way, that being a person of color just walking down the street is not a safe thing to do. Then of course the Black Lives Matter movement, and the subsequent murder of George Floyd. Things all over Southern Oregon erupted and overt racists resurfaced. For me, that was the turning point. Everything leading up to George Floyd and afterwards made me start to feel unsafe in this area. As beautiful this area is, and the gingerbread house-story book quality that Ashland has, I felt and still feel unsafe. As a person of color, I do not feel this is a hospitable place. The final straw was what happened after the Almeda Fire in 2020. The Hispanic population, which was really, on the down low and very quiet up until that point, became completely displaced, and the glaring inequities became apparent.. At that point, I knew I had to go. I needed more cultural diversity, I needed to be able to be more myself. After what happened with Christiana, I realized that I had to kind of put on a mask, at least in some places, and that feeling has only grown since the fire. Now I feel like whenever I leave the house, I have to mask my true self, which is sad.

What is a memory from your time here that you’ll remember most? The Almeda fire is the memory. And it's really interesting because at that point I had moved to Talent, which is right next door to Ashland, so it's just kind of an extension of Ashland. And I had been in my townhome for 8 or 9 months, and I was happy there, happy in the community. My cat Kenji was passing during that time. I wasn't working, it was the time of the COVID lockdown. I was able to take care of him in his last months. I'm very intuitive, and I kept having these visions and dreams of a bomb being dropped in Talent and I thought, I don't live in Beirut… why am I thinking this? Russia or China weren’t going to declare war and bomb Talent Oregon!

The vision seemed a little crazy to me. My other vision I kept having was of fire over the mountains to the east of Talent. I dismissed it as part of the grief I was experiencing over Kenji.

So one month after Kenji had died, I decided I wanted to go out and do something, anything. I went out to get a haircut. It was a very, very windy day and my other cat Luna was home sleeping. I closed all the windows and the doors because the wind was that intense, and I went out. At the salon I got a text that there was a fire... a little fire in Ashland. I didn't think anything of it. But I kept feeling like, no, you need to go home. But I was stubborn: no, I'm staying out. I shopped for awhile they took the scenic way back home. I got a text from a friend who lived about three blocks from me saying, Did you get out alright? I was like, “What the hell are you talking about? Did I get out alright?” “There's a fire!” she texted back. And so, I'll never forget that day because of the fact that nobody told me until it was too late, because I had chosen that one day to leave the house. I had another friend who lived in that area, called me after the first friend, but of course the fire was already there. She told me “ Forget about your cat, save yourself.” I drove in circles for about two hours until I found a way to cut through to my townhouse complex. I grabbed Luna and nothing else. Literally nothing else, because I wasn't thinking at that point.

Luna and I sat in my car on Highway 99 with fire in every direction, and I thought we were gonna die. But then I thought, Well, at least we die together. I didn't know that everything was gonna burn up, and then the next day saw via video that nothing was left of where I lived... I broke down because had I not gone home to get Luna, she would have just burned up… alone. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself or that memory. But I did find a way to get back home and save her, and she stayed with me until July 2022 when she passed after a brief illness.

After the fire, I realized that I hadn’t taken Kenji’s ashes with me. It was gnawing for weeks, but the fire had burned my belongings to white ash. But a miracle happened. Six weeks after the fire, Samaritan's Purse was going into the fire zone to do excavations, and a young woman said a prayer and found his ashes. Kenji wanted to be found! So I have his ashes, and that's really all that matters. I had my mother's ashes there too, and my cat Patch’s ashes, but I knew they would not survive. I have Kenji and Luna’s ashes with me now, so I'm good. That's what I'm gonna remember. I get triggered every day, especially right now because there are fires in the area. Every time I see the sky the same way it was that day, every time the wind kicks up the same way, I just want to crawl under a table and hide. Some people are okay and have moved on with their lives in Southern Oregon, but I knew the only way I would fully heal was by moving away.

In the end my visions were correct. Shortly after the fire was contained, the media showed aerial pictures of a leveled landscaped stained red because of all the fire retardant that was dumped. Even Governor Brown said it looks like a bomb was dropped on Talent. If only I had understood the images, I could have been prepared for what was to come.

To clarify, you had the vision of that, before it happened? Like two months before it happened, I kept having visions of a bomb dropping. And then I had ringing in my ears... A lot of people have ringing in their ears, especially when you get a little older, but this ringing would last a very long time, and it was very loud, and so I knew something was up, but I just didn't know what it was. I now have a bug out bag in my car and jump to attention when my ears begin to ring. I have dreams of post-apocalyptic landscapes and for me it means that the fires will continue to devastate this area for years to come.

In discovering all these things about your family and where you come from, what's the biggest lesson and take away that you have from that, and where do you wanna go next in discovering more about that genealogy? I thought that finding my family, finding my first cousins, would kind of solve everything because I didn't grow up with the family, and it actually caused even more problems, because family is very complicated. It's not all warm and fuzzy. Family is messy. And part of me feels even more alone now than when I found my family, but the other side of it is the genealogy part, going back to the 1700s, knowing that I'm part of a bigger picture, that part of it is very reassuring. I want to learn more about that, and I have to kind of let go of all the pettiness that some of my closer family members have, and the fact that they don't understand me. The majority of my 1st Cousins are suspicious of me, because they don’t understand the story of the larger extended family and their migration story. My family is very suspicious of me, because I am uncovering family stories that has been swept under the rug. So what if they found out I was queer on top of everything else? *Laughs* That's the other thing. Some are okay, like I said, and some would treat me like they treated my Cousin from Fresno. That's what I've learned. I've lived the majority of my life without them and without anyone who knows every aspect of my personality. I have people that see this part of me, or that part of me, but never dig deep enough to view the whole of me.

Do you have any wrap-up thoughts after doing this interview? Not my first interview, but I always find them very interesting because I find out something about myself in my answers.

Can you share? As there isn't one person that I can think of that knew every aspect of me, I realize my deepest relationships are with spirit… divine spirit, divine source, God, whatever you wanna call it. I have a lot of guides, a lot of my ancestors are guides.