A coming-of-age personal memoir set in the early aughts between the Lower East Side and Bushwick, as a teen punk brought into the legacy of grassroots community organizing by Black and Boricua elders. As a child growing up in the ‘90s, I was the only documented person in my family and was taught to always keep my family’s status a secret to evade deportation, which conditioned me into silence. However, in my teens I was immediately attracted to protests and subcultures, which are both very loud communities and environments. I also did not have any immediate role models to look up to, and most of my family lived in Colombia, so I turned to my peers and elders within community organizing and the local punk scenes to guide me on the path that I was walking.
Ingrid Romero
I am interested in sharing this story because it juxtaposes the idea of a silent conditioning that many immigrant Latinx young women and femmes go through with the loud and messy upbringing that marginalized youth experience in New York City. As a current public school art teacher at an alternative high school that has directly impacted students from all five boroughs enrolled in, I witness daily the need for stories that tell the truth and offer a journey that is relatable to what young people are still experiencing now. Intertwined with the social and political historical context of the places and people that have shaped me into who I am now. It will be narrated from my current self in their mid-30s, reflecting on my teen-punk-organizer-self between the ages of 15-17 years old.
