100% American: Honduran, born in Hollywood. Chicana hasta los huesos.

Ethnicity, religion, and searching for the sacred in the profane.

Jul 01, 2025

I started writing this essay in March after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was first deported to CECOT. Since then, I have been struggling to write a blog post as the news has been bleak and traumatic and I have been trying to take care of myself using the tools I have learned over the past 20 years to keep my inner fire alive. I have been praying, meditating, reading, learning, watching, listening, and pondering how to think about what is happening in the world, in the country in a way that might be helpful rather than unloading my panic and fear into a social media ecosystem teeming with alarming doom.

The current regime’s state sponsored terrorism of the immigrant communities has triggered my need to express my experience of examining, uncovering, and discarding harmful beliefs (while keeping those that feel true and life affirming) that have permeated every aspect of my life as an American. This includes beliefs rooted in the last 500 years of settler colonial-imperialism/Euro-American hegemony and the last 100 years of hyper-capitalistic/manipulative mass media. Firstly, I am not arguing or fighting with bigots anymore. I am done trying to convince anyone of anything. Too much of my life force energy has been spent trying to awaken those who are committed to the cult of delusion of white supremacy colonialism.

The title of my newsletter “CatraChicana” is a word I made up to describe my ethnic identity as an American. Catracha meaning Honduran descent; Chicana meaning Mexican-American descent. Both terms are terms that indicate both a political and cultural sense of self-esteem, dignity, and celebratory-ness in the ethnic identity that has become extremely maligned to where the words “Mexican” or “Honduras” become synonymous with a slur in the mainstream US lexicon-narrative. My Honduran grandmother immigrated with my dad and aunts in the 1960s to Los Angeles. In those days, they were one of very few Central American immigrant families in Hollywood. My grandmother settled and secured work as a housekeeper, eventually starting an agency where she helped recent immigrants in LA secure jobs as service workers in rich families' homes. Eventually she helped her siblings move to LA including my great uncle who opened a Honduran restaurant (“El Caracol Hondureño” where they served food like black beans, platanos, and sopa de caracol).

At that time in the 1980s the restaurant was located in the McArthur Park neighborhood where civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua resulted in an influx of Central American immigrants in the 1980s. Central America has a long history of US backed dictators and military coups who have inflicted state violence to displace Indigenous communities to extract the natural resources, exploit labor of the poor citizens of their countries. The United States participated in economic colonialism extracting resources, setting up companies like the American-owned United Fruit Company (hence “the Banana Republic”), creating indentured servants where the low pay would be spent on the stores within these plantations, perpetuating the ongoing project of imperialism and colonialism, extracting labor and ruling through state-sanctioned violence and abuse.

I have lived all my life in liminal spaces in terms of race, class, nationality, language, education, and health. I learned to be extremely hypervigilant of my surroundings and how to bob and weave through space and time. In terms of my privilege, I’m educated, a native English speaker, a U.S. born citizen, and mestiza, meaning I am mixed race (Indigenous, African and European). My skin affords me privilege in some contexts, but not in others. I am currently in terms of class, economics, bodily ability, am in a less privileged continuum as a stroke survivor with hemiplegia on SSDI. I’m not a political scientist or expert on authoritarian regimes; I am a concerned American citizen, who loves music, art, history, and learning.

I had so much to say about the for-profit prisons. I wanted to give a history of the Trump regime’s corrupt for-profit prison incentive to increase illegal and inhumane so-called deportations (kidnappings). The firehose of clownishness and cruelty that exemplifies the day-to-day “operations” of the Trump regime hides multiple layers of illegality, corruption, and a basic lack of human decency. Essentially what we have is not a government with the rule of law but a cartoonish mafia-style criminal enterprise participating in flagrant bribery and extortion rackets. There is no reality in which the Trump regime has any moral or ethical legitimacy. This is simply abuse of power masquerading as a legitimate government. With the tearing down of civil and human and environmental rights, these are all tentacles from the same octopus: abuse. It's no surprise that the cabinet is filled with abusive predators.

The history of humanity is a legacy of war and brutality and trauma. Still we labor to free ourselves from this barbarism as there are still people who seek to take us back to the days of feudal lords and extractive imperialism, ownership and control over women’s bodies, slave and child labor.

After 530 years from when the Spanish set forth to colonize the Americas, for most modern day people of mixed Indigenous, African, and European descent known as Latinos/Latinx/Latine, the Catholic Church as an institution is an invisible ancestor.

The reality is that the United States is coming to terms with its mythology around its origin story. Fascist and colonial overlords have a common practice: burning books. When I started learning about the history of how the Catholic Church burned the books of the Aztecs and the Mayans I was devastated.

“Catholic-ish” to “Spiritual Not Religious”

Growing up as a Gen X Chicana in Southern California in the 70s and 80s, I grew up vaguely Catholic (more by tradition than conviction) because it was so integral to the culture of both my Mexican-American maternal family and my Honduran immigrant paternal family.

Bibles, rosaries, crucifixes, statues of Jesus and la Virgen were ubiquitous, both in the environment and the aesthetics of the subculture I grew up surrounded by. I was baptized, took catechism classes, had my first communion and went to confession and Catholic high school in Riverside, California.

Nevertheless, I always felt awkward and inauthentic doing the rituals and saying memorized prayers by rote or going to confession. From an early age, perhaps because of my childhood cancer experience, I was a sensitive and thoughtful kid. I always felt a sense of some Higher Power, yet I did not have a sense of faith because I didn't feel connected to a specific religion. I really thought religiosity or spirituality was a fixed innate trait like eye color. I was restless in my search for truth and meaning.

Fundamentalists and extremists aside, I have always admired folks of sincere faith and considered them to be righteous. And in the history of social justice movements people of faith and religious backgrounds have been integral. It has been hard to reconcile the violent colonial legacy around the Christian and Catholic missionaries (the crusades, colonialism, genocide, residential schools, slavery). I always felt drawn to mysticism as well as the esoteric, though because of the dogmatic Christians and Catholics I grew up around, I was always afraid of being authentic in my true beliefs for fear of being judged by others. Later as I became an adult and tried to find some peace of mind via 12-step programs where we are encouraged to find our own spirituality, I was led to my current path of “spiritual not religious.”

God is everywhere there is kindness including in the gutter, the hospitals and in the alleys with the desperate.

I seek God in the ordinary and humble stillness. My late father was a huge inspiration to me in developing my faith. He used to tell me that his worst fear was that he would die in an alley, drunk and alone. After he got sober he was very compassionate to homeless vagabonds drinking out of a paper bag and begging at the gas station. He would always give them some money and treat them with compassion and humanity. He would say “There by the Grace of God Go I”. I learned how to do that as well. Years later. I remember one time coming across a guy literally laying in the gutter next to the 7-Eleven on the Southwest corner of Bundy and Idaho. People were stepping over him to get to cross the street to get to the Starbucks. I called the ambulance and they came and got him. I recognized the EMTs as the same ones who came to my apartment the last drug-induced panic attack I had several months before.

With the passing of Pope Francis and his outspoken support of marginalized people, I’m reminded of the legacy of Liberation theology and St Oscar Romero and Father Greg Boyle of East LA who founded Homeboy Industries and exemplifies love in action and that no one is disposable, no matter what tattoos they have.

Going back to Kilmar, the most egregious aspect of the conversation around his case was the argument as to whether he was a gang member or not. In fact, the way the mainstream media defends immigrants by saying they are not “criminals” (which they are not), begs the question, do even adjudicated gang members deserve to be trafficked to a for-profit torture concentration camp? I would posit, the moral answer is absolutely not.

As a battle-hardened survivor of multiple traumas, the only satisfactory path I have found to alchemize the utter heartbreak and tragic loss that is inherent in living as a feeling human with awareness and presence is the path of the sacred, developing my soul and learning how to love and cultivate a reverence for life.

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Additional Reading

When a wave of torture and murder staggered a small U.S. ally, truth was a casualty.

The US military trained him. Then he helped murder Berta Cáceres

Who killed Berta Cáceres? Behind the brutal murder of an environment crusader

The Roots of Immigration from El Salvador and Current Policy Debates

Comparing the Biden and Trump Deportation Records

Central American Stories

Latin America vs. the United States: A Tale of Two Independence Movements | Mises Institute

The American Revolution and Latin America: An Essay in Imagery, Perceptions, and Ideological Influence

Latin American Independence in the Age of Revolutions

How the American Revolution Spurred Independence Movements Around the World | HISTORY