I grew up in a valley that fed this country while children nearby went hungry. My grandparents worked in the fields, then walked into stores where people judged them for not speaking English. They helped put food on people’s tables, yet still had to prove they belonged in the very place they called home.
By fourteen, I was homeless. I learned survival before I finished being a child. Police harassed me and others in my neighborhood. At school, adults saw how I looked and reacted, then asked what I was carrying. I grew up feeling that strangers knew my story better than I did.
I wasn’t in a gang. Many children around me weren’t either. Some avoided violence; others sought protection or belonging in gangs, despite the dangers. Families deserved safe streets. So did children growing up on them.
Sanger, a farming town near Fresno, obtained gang injunctions in 2003 and 2012. Prosecutors credited the first with fewer calls for service. Families feared gang violence; children like me also feared being mistaken for it. The numbers couldn’t tell us who had a safe place to go or an adult willing to listen.
A neighborhood could be called dangerous while the children living there were themselves in danger. We saw the label before we saw the child.
What Pain Can Teach Us to See
I know anger. It can stay with you long after the moment that caused it. When you’ve felt unseen, someone who stands up for your people can feel like the first person who sees you. That loyalty carries love. It can also make us reluctant to question what happens in our name.
A confrontation appears on a phone. Before hearing the whole story, we know whom to praise. Psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira describe how political party identity can shape which information we accept. Their model concerns partisanship, but it raises a question about my own loyalty: Am I defending what happened, or what I need to believe happened?
Jiddu Krishnamurti asked whether we can clearly observe another person when our memories and prejudices interfere. When I feel most certain, I ask what I still haven’t understood.
I don’t want our people to be silent in the face of injustice. Silence can leave families unprotected and institutions unaccountable. Protest, organizing, and demands for change matter. The US government can arrest and detain; residents challenging it cannot. Those powers are not equal. Still, we must ask whether our actions protect people or leave someone else carrying more fear.
What Our People Built
In 1965, Filipino farmworkers led by Larry Itliong struck Delano. Mexican and Mexican American workers joined eight days later, defying divisions growers had exploited. Later retellings often overlooked Filipino organizers.
Workers shared a union hall and strike kitchen, sustained a boycott, and won contracts in 1970. When I think of my grandparents, I picture workers who helped feed the country needing someone to feed them so they could return to the picket lines. Care sustained resistance; it did not replace it.
The Black Panther Party confronted state violence and organized free breakfasts for children. In 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the program potentially the greatest threat to efforts to neutralize the Party. Its contradictions and government repression deserve study. Still, children were hungry, and people organized a meal.
Luis Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino on the Delano picket lines. He later incorporated In Lak’ech into Pensamiento Serpentino, crediting Maya scholar Domingo Martínez Paredes for the teaching. Tú eres mi otro yo. You are my other me.
Those words became harder for me to live than to admire.
What Healing Asked of Me
Anger Essential Reads
My brother Sammy Mercado was missing for six months. We later learned he had been shot and murdered. There is a particular cruelty in not knowing where your brother is, then having to live with knowing how he died. Nothing makes that loss acceptable.
I wrestled with forgiving the person who killed him. Accountability still mattered. I wanted my love for Sammy, not hatred for his killer, to shape what came next. In a 2016 study, sociologist Kristen Hourigan (now Kristen Discola) found different understandings of forgiveness among homicide survivors, often shaped by family or faith. Forgiveness was my path, never a demand on another grieving family.
I cannot tell you what would have prevented Sammy’s murder. I can tell you what I do now. I work with schools to help young people find caring adults and possibilities beyond survival. I want to reach children who remind me of Sammy, and children adults have already decided are dangerous. I cannot know which opportunities might interrupt violence. That uncertainty cannot become an excuse to offer none.
Shawn Ginwright’s healing-centered engagement calls us to change the conditions that produce suffering and to care for adults’ healing, too. I call these compounded burdens Poverty 4x: poverty, trauma, racism, and cultural erasure. We count arrests and absences, but do we know who needs shelter or an adult who believes in them?
Now I sit at tables where adults once made decisions about children like me. When a child arrives with a label, I need to learn what is happening in their life before deciding what to do next. Healing that stays inside me is not enough. It must change what I do with a seat at that table, especially when my anger feels justified.
At fourteen, I didn’t need someone to make the world afraid of my neighborhood. I needed someone to see that I was afraid of it. I needed somewhere to sleep and adults who saw beyond how I had learned to survive.
Would the fourteen-year-old boy I once was have felt safe, seen, and worthy in the presence of the adult I have become?
My titles cannot answer that. Neither can my intentions. The children standing in front of me will live with the answer.
In Lak’ech.