I’ve got a great friend who knows a lot of cool women in Denver. This friend tells me I have to meet and interview Alicia Cardenas, an amazing woman who has been running her own business, Sol Tribe Tattoo and Body Piercing for years, and raising a kickass daughter while doing both in her own signature style. I didn’t have anymore information before I reached out to Alicia except that recommendation. But like every woman in this project, I could just get a read off of her, that yes, this is one of the stories I want to hear and add to the conversation I am having with American women in this past year.
There are some days that you wake up and do the thing and meet the teacher you were supposed to have that day in life to make you a more aware human being. Somedays you are the teacher yourself and that is a good thing but its really a great thing to have the opportunity to learn and leave the suddenly worn out parameters of yourself behind and fit into a larger, looser space. Meeting. talking with, and listening to Alicia was one of those student days for me, I invite you to do the same here:
To enjoy the full length interview with Alicia, please follow the link and enjoy –Â https://vimeo.com/283352778
When Alicia and I were messaging back and forth about the interview process before we met, she said an interesting thing that sparked me. Alicia stated that she didn’t know if she was a good fit for my project because she didn’t believe in the concept of “safe”, that it didn’t exist and that it was a byproduct of privilege to live in the sensation of that unreal thing. I responded that was exactly why I wanted to interview her and that I didn’t have an agenda of what safety and refuge could mean to each women I talked to, I want to know what these ideas mean to each individual, thats where I think its the most juicy. That Alicia was experiencing these ideas I had been exploring from a vastly different perspective, that made me excited to meet her, I knew I was going to learn something true.
Alicia and I met in the morning at one of her sacred spaces in life, her shop Sol Tribe. Its an warm, sensual, environment. All dark woods and metals and spirals and hoops. Needles and ceramics and alters. It smells good and is an environment of dedicated creativity.
And diversity. There is a Pride rainbow flag hanging from the window of the shop that is directly across from one of the rainbow crosswalks that decorate the queer-friendly Denver neighborhood.
Queer, non-binary, trans, cis, black, brown, white, feminist, weirdo, whatever you are into just check your bigotry at the door and engage in respect – This is Alicia Cardenas’s world and this is Sol Tribe.
We started talking and one of the first topics we explored was what its like to be a single mom and operating her own business. Alicia has been asked in many interviews what its like to be a hispanic, single mom running her own tattoo shop in the US today. her response to me, “Lucky. ” Which was a brilliant answer. Alicia went on to explain that though we are addressing privilege, and white privilege, in current social conversations, what American privilege means is the real conversation.
We in this country have a vast, complicated system of classification that determines who gets the stuff and who doesn’t. Obviously, caucasian straight men are at the top of the pyramid but its not just skin color or identified gender that gives you the go to rise to the top. Its education. Access to education gives you the tools to navigate the ladder of class, gives you choice. Access to that education is systematically made difficult to individuals who are not caucasian, not male, not born into wealth, not born into “enough”. This is where class supersedes skin color, but those class lines are in alignment with your racial background and if you identify with having more than enough or not. It comes down to what you are taught, how your class placement defines you. Education gives an individual a possible loophole to move with more fluidity through our system of class.
Then there is the reality of American privilege thats sets us apart from the rest of the global community, it also isolates us in our American bubble of what is “real”. Suffering to success, we have a very skewed and rigid vision of what those realities look like and the realities in between. Alicia spoke clearly and with great intelligence based on personal experience as a world traveler and educated observation, of how these factors all go into American privilege. Alicia pointed out that we do not as Americans, experience poverty on the same level that most of the rest of the world does, we are a country with extraordinary abundance and we take that for granted and mindlessly consume our resources, willfully ignorant of the finite ending that is looming ahead. There is definitely poverty here in the US, everywhere, right next door to those who have enough. But it is not experienced to the great depth that most of cultures in the rest of the world experience. It comes close on our Native American reservations, in downtown LA on Skid Row, the Appalachian mountain communities, but not to the overwhelming magnitude experienced elsewhere . With this padding of great wealth we take so much for granted and feel entitled to everything. Our collective misunderstanding of our country’s experience with suffering makes us quite juvenile in our national behavior and how we play it out on an international level. We are the bratty kids in the corner refusing to share our toys with each other and the rest of the classroom. We expect as our right, so much more than the rest of the world and kick and scream instead of collective problem solving if we feel denied. We don’t take care of each other very well and we definitely do not share responsibility with the other countries on this planet.
In Alicia speaking with great intelligence on all of this and much more – check out her full interview, its quite a treat – she was reinforcing conversations I’ve been having with people quite a bit, especially in the last couple of years under our current political administration. We are having an exciting dialogue about American privilege, white privilege, class, gender, sexual orientation, our abusive national ancestry, with greater truth than ever before. It’s been so extraordinarily uncomfortable and necessary and we still have so far to go as a nation to integrate our vast differences and the truth of our heritage. But this is where education is so important. We educate each other on our personal life experiences and how we actually effect one another.
As a white woman born in the US with access and understanding of the benefits of education, I have got it made. I have had my struggles which I will not belittle as they have made me who I am and I like who I am. But my struggles are not as demoralizing on a daily basis as most other people around me. My weight is not as back-breaking, I was given the privilege of seeking and obtaining enough in this world simply because my skin is the right color and I was able to cultivate my mind through a wonderful world education. I don’t experience the same barriers as others not born into my world because simply, they are not there. Lucky indeed.
Another way that I am lucky is that I was born with a personality that loves to be challenged. My whole life I have sought out and thrived on having my assumptions blown wide open. The national conversations we have been having in the last couple of years have been challenging and exciting as I repeatedly experience coming up against one of my cultural assumption walls, having it be uncomfortable, and then opening up to letting my misinformation go. To learn, everyday what it means to be someone else. To learn about my own level of misinformation and what I have always taken for granted with each eye-opening experience. To be humble about my lack of true knowlege but to embrace the opportunity to learn about what it means to be a compassionate human.
So listening to Alicia, I had one of those learning curve moments. That day Alicia was one of my teachers. While I stood behind my camera and watched and listened, the shiver learning went down my back. I understood that much more how deep my misconceptions lay of what is real in my relationship to my privilege. How much I have to let go of in my entitlement. In how much space I take up just because I was born into the class that I was. Just because my skin is white, just because I am who i am. I got “woke” in that time with Alicia and it will be a continual learning curve my whole life and I thank the teachers who will be patient and take the time to explain to me the obvious.
What surfaced after my conversation with Alicia was a new, deeper understanding of my assumed privilege. It sunk in after the interview and continues to blossom in my consciousness, its how I need to stop wasting my privilege. To know I have access to a life experience denied to so many means I have greater responsibility to it, I need to treat this privilege with awareness and respect. I have a tendency to purposefully self-destruct at different times, to burn down my house in a cleansing emotional fire and walk away to start something new. To put myself if desperate situations where I deplete my resources down to zero and then indulge in a panic game to distract myself by feeling unworthy of abundance. Its juvenile and completely unnecessary as an fully adult woman with as much opportunity as I have. We all have our teachers at the right time when we are ready to learn and move forward. I have stepped through a door of awareness recently and another one is just right around the corner. I will not waste the gifts given me any longer, its time to pay it forward consciously.
But enough of my experience and back to Alicia Cardenas. Alicia has a great story; discovered the tattoo world as a teenager and found her place in the world right out of the gate in that culture of outlaws and weirdos. She has not needed to compromise her true voice ever and the life long cultivation of her strength is evident in every gesture she makes. Alicia has chosen to raise her daughter outside the confines of preconceived motherhood and what the privilege of education can look like for her child, she is all in one hundred percent. Alicia moves like a queen, regal and strong and deliberate. Her words are intelligent and have weight, she is precise which I greatly admire. She is a community leader and teacher to many, she creates and holds sacred space. She understands the importance of asking for help as it does indeed take a village and she understands what it means to help others by often just holding space for them. Alicia is paying attention and she has an expectation that others are paying attention as well and there’s no room for bullshit there. I admire this American woman, Alicia’s clarity is a gift and she gives it freely and with grace.
This is the nature of refuge.
